HYDERABAD: The Prohibition and Excise department, who cracked down on drug peddling in the city, lacks even a basic technology to track down the address of peddlers. In case of a raid, the department officials seek help from the city police department for the same.
Sample this: There’s a mid-night raid wherein sleuths know that the suspect’s home is within a 2 km radius but don’t know the door number. The raiding team can do nothing else but contact officials in other law enforcement agency to zero in on the address. In the meantime, if the suspect learns about the raid and escapes, all efforts go down the drain.
“There could have been such situations,” sources in the Excise department admit.
If not escape, shadowing them closely just to know where they live, takes enormous amount of time. Case in point, sources said that before busting the duty-free liquor racket — where government officials and others bought liquor at duty free shops in Shamshabad airport using air passengers passport and sold it at higher prices outside — they shadowed one of the persons in racket for two months to know his address and other details.
“If we had some tool to know his address in a span of few minutes, we could have busted the racket much earlier. We spend more than `10,000 a month on diesel expenses since we are provided only `33,000-`34,000 a month to hire a vehicle. Instead, if own vehicles are provided to Excise department, we don’t have to spend money from our pockets,” sources said.
All we need to overcome this hurdle is access to the mobile application used by Hyderabad Police to find address and other details using only phone number. “Besides this, to obtain Call Data Records (CDR) of people whom we want to interrogate, we have to approach Intelligence Cell of Telangana state police. Since getting the technology for our department is not possible, we need a nodal officer who will file requests for CDR and follow it up with the Intelligence cell,” sources said.
Though they have been busting several drugs and narcotics rackets, there is no means by which the state Excise department can know if the drugs seized by them is really a drug or a spurious product.