Why Agra Is Fast Turning Into A Narcotics Hub

New Delhi, 3 Jan 2021:

Agra, best known for the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri, is now a bustling hub for the narcotics trade. It seems the traffickers are using the city, just 231 km south-east of the national capital, to store narcotics in huge quantities. Several instances have come to light in the past few months of drug syndicates hiring warehouses to stock large quantities of synthetic drugs, including Tramadol pain relief injections and Alprazolam tablets. The most recent incident was on December 19 when officials of the Delhi-based Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), the Agra drug administration department and the UP police, raided the warehouse of interstate drug smuggler Pankaj Gupta.

Drugs and abortion kits worth Rs 5 crore was recovered from the house of a BJP worker in Kamla Nagar which had been converted into a warehouse. Gupta, who lives in Tejnagar locality in Agra, has been absconding since last year when he was charged with drug smuggling. He had apparently been running the warehouse for the past five years. Police have arrested Gupta’s brother and son.

"The gang was supplying narcotics to several districts of UP as well as in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal,” says drug inspector Naresh Mohan Deepak. The gang zeroed in on warehouses in densely settled parts of the city, chose ones that were owned by influential people, and paid handsome rents for the premises. His gang used two courier companies to send drugs to nine states. Action is also likely now against the courier companies.

Agra shot into the drugs limelight in 2017 after the Punjab Police traced narcotics consignments back to an "Agra gang". The gang supplies drugs in Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Bihar. The city’s easy connectivity with all these states makes it perfect, location-wise. National Highway 24 passes through the city of Agra. Apart from this, Agra-Lucknow Expressway, Yamuna Expressway and Agra-Jaipur Highway also pass through the district.

The drugs are brought from places like Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad and stored in godowns in places like Sikandra, Freeganj, Balkeshwar and Yamuna Par in the city. From here, they are despatched to Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Gujarat.

In a sensational case on July 29, mafia don Jitendra Arora, wanted for drug smuggling in several states, was caught when the police raided his warehouse (also located in Kamla Nagar). Drugs worth Rs 15 crore were seized in the raid.

In August, a team of the Gwalior narcotics department recovered fake medicines worth Rs 20 crore from a warehouse in Balkeshwar in the city. On December 15, the Amritsar Police arrested three drug smugglers from the Kathunangal area and seized 346,000 injectible shots of synthetic drugs from their possession. The drugs were apparently being manufactured in Agra and Delhi.

The NCB and the UP department of drug administration say the city also stocks medicinal kits used for illegal sex determination tests in Haryana and Rajasthan. A raid at two firms located in the Gogia market in Agra brought this to light. On December 10, the drugs department confiscated the hard disks of the master computers at both firms. Initial investigation found quite a few suspicious data including involvement in the illegal drugs business. An in-depth analysis of the data revealed information about a large racket being run from Agra. An officer associated with the investigation says, "Drug dealers keep deleting the data on their computers and laptops. But a root file of these activities remains. IT specialists of our department searched the history in the computers and got the information about the entire racket.”

An official of the UP department of drug administration says drugs are also supplied in and around Agra. There is demand as it is a big tourist destination—on average the city gets 7 million tourists a year but numbers were down this year due to the pandemic.

The Department of Drug Administration of UP has also sought the help of GST officials since there are charges that the racket runs on fake bills. Ashu Sharma, president of the Agra Chemists Association, alleges that the drug department is using the seizures as an excuse and conducting raids just to harass the city’s chemists. According to Sharma, the guilty are let off while the innocent small shopkeepers are being booked. The Chemists Association also alleges that no action was taken against a drug inspector accused of taking bribes from counterfeiters and drug peddlers.India Today