NEW DELHI
Ahead of festival season, Delhi Police busted two factories and arrested a mastermind behind the adulterated spices being circulated in Delhi, causing serious health hazards. The police seized 25 tonnes of fake cumin and black pepper and around 40 kg of raw material for preparing adulterated spices from a godown located in Jindpur village in the outer northern district.
The Special Commissioner of Police, Ravinder Singh Yadav, said in a press statement that the accused had confessed during the interrogation that the spices were adulterated. Earlier, he used to do this business in Gujarat and shifted to Delhi two years ago to earn more profits. Moreover, he used to procure raw materials from Rajasthan and Kanpur and later sold these adulterated spices in Khari Baoli, Gujarat, Ghaziabad, and Uttar Pradesh.
According to the police, they received information about adulterated spices being circulated in the market. Based on this information, the police set a trap and arrested one person, Bagesh Gupta (38), for transporting these fake spices in a tempo to the market. The police, based on their intelligence, raided his godown, and a huge quantity of black pepper seeds, cumin seeds, bags of stone powder, an adulterating machine, a weighing machine, seera, and adulterated colours were recovered. Then a team of officials from the Department of Food and Safety, Government of NCT, was called on the spot, and samples were taken by them to check the quality of the spices. The team found the spices to be adulterated. Based on this, a complaint was registered, and the accused was arrested.