Cachar, Jul 3 :When Violet Barua, Cachar’s first woman superintendent of police, assumed charge about two months ago, she was greeted with a dismal crime graph.
Teamed with an insurgency combat expert, additional superintendent of police Pradip Ranjan Kar (who joined around the same time), Barua chalked out a detailed plan to rein in the district’s flourishing smuggling rackets.The intelligence wing was alerted and late last month the police busted a well-networked rice smuggling racket at the Silchar regional office of Food Corporation of India.
Huge contingents of rice were regularly siphoned off from the high-security FCI godown at Ramnagar on the outskirts of Silchar.
Porters were busy stacking away sacks that were meant to be smuggled, when around 10pm on June 26, a police team, led by Barua and Kar, surrounded the godown.
Caught unawares, the porters and a number of FCI personnel made a feeble attempt to get away but were soon overpowered.
Fifty-nine sacks of rice were seized from the godown.
After a brief interrogation, the police discovered how the racket managed to smuggle out the rice despite FCI’s strict auditing procedures.
The food corporation allows a “two per cent wastage” of rice stored in sacks, which weigh one quintal each.
Once the “waste amount” was calculated, a group of FCI personnel contacted the smugglers.
The operations were always conducted by night, when the smugglers arrived in trucks and the FCI personnel kept an eye so that the “unaware” officials did not visit the godown at that time.
Some sacks were also siphoned off from trucks on their way to Mizoram. But that is a larger network involving the truckers as well.
Twelve FCI employees and homeguards have been arrested for links with the smuggling racket. The vigilance wing of the FCI has begun an investigation, said area manager Tarun Deshmukhya.
Soon after the FCI raid, the police team tasted success again when it seized a large contingent of heroin during a raid at Rannagar Tuko, a village near Silchar.
Next on Barua and Kar’s crackdown list are the timber smugglers.
The police have begun an operation in Sonai and impounded timber worth Rs 2 lakh from the house of one Noor Mohammad, who has been taken into custody.
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