HYDERABAD: Acting on a tip-off, sleuths with the LB Nagar Special Operations Team (SOT), Vanasthalipuram police and Agriculture Department officials on Monday busted a spurious cotton seed supplying racket operating between Karnataka and Telangana via Andhra Pradesh and seized 15 quintals of seeds and other material, all worth Rs 30 lakh. Two habitual offenders Mannem Laxmi Narayana of Telangana and Namburi Srinivasa Rao of Andhra Pradesh, allegedly involved in the racket, were also arrested.
The supplier Narayana Reddy, who is from Karnataka, is at large, said Rachakonda Commissioner of Police (CP) Mahesh Bhagwat. Police said the accused Laxmi Narayana and Srinivasa have been friends for over 10 years and were procuring banned BT-3 cotton seeds from Karnataka. They would sell it to gullible farmers in Telangana, Maharashtra and Odisha saying that it would help them get more harvest than the usual seeds.
On Saturday, they bought the spurious seeds from Narayana Reddy from Kolar at Rs 550 per kg and transported them to Laxmi Naryan’s house in Mansoorabad. They were planning to sell it to farmers for Rs 1,200 per kg.
In 2019, Laxmi Narayana was named in six criminal cases for supplying spurious seeds to farmers in Khammam. Though he was arrested and sent to judicial remand, the cases are still pending before the court. After getting bail, he continued the spurious seed business with his friend Srinivasa Rao, who has been named in a cheating case in Nalgonda. Laxmi Narayana was detained under the Preventive Detention (PD) Act at Rachakonda in 2020.