1.09 lakh gloves, 65,000 masks seized in drive against black marketeers
New Delhi: Nearly 1.09 lakh gloves, 65,000 sanitary masks and thermal scanners were recovered from three places in east Delhi in a joint operation against hoarders
New Delhi: Nearly 1.09 lakh gloves, 65,000 sanitary masks and thermal scanners were recovered from three places in east Delhi in a joint operation against hoarders and black marketeers by the police and Delhi government officials. A total of 10,700 kg of wheat and 800 kg of rice were also hoarded at a fair price shop in Delhi’s Chanakya Place, officials associated with the operation said.
The Delhi government and the city police have been repeatedly cautioning people not to hoard when the country is a under a 21-day national lockdown.
In the first operation on March 23, the Shahdara police along with teams of ADM, Shahdara and SDM Vivek Vihar conducted a raid at a house in Karkardooma after information that the house owner, who is in the business of supplying essential medical equipments, had illegally stocked such items.
“We seized 1.09 lakh gloves, 64,878 packets of masks and six thermometers from the house. A case under section 7 of Essential Commodities Act was registered and the house owner, Sachin Grover, was bound down in the case. Grover had been hoarding the items with intent to sell them on higher rates,” said Dinesh Kumr Gupta, deputy commissioner of police (Shahdara).
In a similar raid on Thursday, two men Jagan Nath and Iqbal Javed, were arrested from Seelampur area after they were caught hoarding masks and sanitisers. Both of them ran medical stores.
“A senior government official went to buy the items posing as a decoy customer. Both the medical store owners claimed that the items were not available. But when a raid was conducted, several masks and bottles of sanitisers were found,” said DCP, (northeast) Ved Prakash Surya.
In another raid, the food and supply minister, along with the enforcement team visited a Fair Price Shop at Chanakya Place in southwest Delhi and found its owner and the record book missing. “There was only a cash memo and on checking the stock at shop and allocation of food supply to the shop, a shortage of: Wheat (1000 kg wheat) and Rice 800 kg was found misappropriated by the shop owner,” said a police officer.
A case was registered and the shop owner, Prashant Rathi, was nabbed. His questioning led to the recovery of 7,000 kg of the misappropriated wheat, the officer added.