E-Paper
GT road, Grand Chord rail line safe haven for smuggling drugs to Delhi
Rohtas police on Monday recovered 38 kgs of Doda powder and arrested a man and a woman from a Delhi bund bus. The drug was worth ₹30 lakh in Delhi, the arrested smugglers told police.
Recent seizures of narcotics in huge quantities by the Bihar police have indicated that the Grand Trunk (GT) road and Grand Chord railway line have become a safe haven for smuggling Doda powder to national capital Delhi.
Rohtas police on Monday recovered 38 kgs of Doda powder and arrested a man and a woman from a Delhi bund bus. The drug was worth ₹30 lakh in Delhi, the arrested smugglers, identified as Jogan Ram of Latehar and Noorani Bibi of Palamu, told police.
Rohtas SP Ashish Bharti said that police and intelligence officers have been interrogating the arrested smugglers to know the kingpins and white-collared persons behind the illegal narcotics trade.
On September 22, the officials at Aurangabad had seized 97 kgs of Doda powder worth ₹77 lakh from a tribal man and an 18-year-old girl of Palamu. They confessed to coming to Aurangabad to board a Delhi bound train to hand over the consignment in Delhi.
On June 9, Gaya police had seized 112 kgs of Doda powder worth ₹90 lakh from an auto-rickshaw near Dobhi on GT Road (NH 2). The consignment was to be loaded on a Delhi-bound bus.
Opium and Doda powder were also seized from smugglers in Gumla and some other districts of Jharkhand in recent months.
The contraband drug, often called ‘the poor man’s heroin’, is a narcotic derived from the opium poppy and is in high demand for making Ayurvedic and Unani medicines as well as used by addicts in the national capital, Noida and Gurugram. Some so-called Hakims also used the powder for making medicines, an official said.
Opium is cultivated under Maoist’s protection in their dominated areas in remote hilly Gaya and Aurangabad districts of south Bihar and bordering Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Drug smuggling is a good source of their earning.
Police and security agencies working in the region to finish the economic resources of Maoists often destroy the poppy cultivation in these districts. But it is very difficult to locate the cultivation in dense hilly forests in the unapproachable terrain.
Licensed growers have to destroy Doda after extracting the Opium. But due to the lack of monitoring of the destruction process by the government, smugglers are earning crores by buying Doda from the farmers at cheap rates, said an official.
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