Smuggling of gold continues in new forms

Hyderabad: There seems to be no dearth of alternatives that street-smart smugglers resort to as they try to cheat the police. When all air routes were blocked during the lockdown, these wily smugglers significantly altered their modus operandi and began exploring the ‘safer’ option of taking the land route across the Indo-Myanmar border for smuggling gold. 

“In a significant shift in the trend from 2019-20, the largest amount of gold seized by us originated in Myanmar. We identified some of the kingpins and nabbed them," said an officer of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI).

Officials from the DRI have registered a number of cases for smuggling of gold, narcotic substances, among others, during 2021. Keeping constant vigil over the land route, with a view to counter large-scale smuggling, DRI officials seized 256.94 kgs of gold and prevented their smuggling in the last three quarters of this fiscal.

DRI officials said that the number of cases of gold smuggling detected during the period in which the economic activities gradually picked up after the lockdown restrictions were eased also showed a steady increase, on a trajectory similar to the increase in legitimate imports of gold.

In Hyderabad, the teams of DRI have kept close vigil on smuggling movements by way of transporting gold in different forms from different countries at RGIA. They said that Hyderabad was one of the hotspots for smuggling of gold from abroad.

"Investigations have revealed smuggling of huge quantities of foreign origin gold from Myanmar into India. The spurt of economic activity after lockdown together with the pent-up demand for gold, led to a surge in such smuggling activities," officials said.

The DRI officials said that they have noticed a new trend of a new category of carriers, through which gold smuggling was carried out, including using carriers hired specially for the purpose.

Meanwhile, in Telangana, DRI officials registered  at least ten cases and seized gold from passengers.

Gold seized by DRI across India
2020

July: Rs 95.63 crore

August: Rs 102.54 crore
November: Rs  140.42 crore
December: Rs 198.6 crore

2021

January: Rs 161.3 crore