At the stroke of midnight on Friday, tens of thousands of stateless people who were stranded for decades along the poorly defined India-Bangladesh border will finally get to choose their citizenship, as the two countries swapped more than 150 pockets of land to settle the demarcation line dividing them.

Television images showed people setting off firecrackers and raising an Indian flag in the Masaldanga enclave, which became part of India.

India's External Affairs Ministry in a statement described July 31 as a historic day for both India and Bangladesh as "it marks the resolution of a complex issue that has lingered since independence" from British colonialism in 1947.