Fraudsters, thieves tearing apart Surat’s famed textile markets

SURAT: Textile traders in the country’s largest man-made fabric (MMF) wholesale market in Surat are facing the menace of organized ‘taka lifter gangs’ since the past many years. Bundles of polyester dyed and printed fabrics are lifted from transport tempos by gangs and sold at half the price to other traders, causing losses to the tune of Rs500 crore per annum to the victims.
Recently, textile traders at Radha Krishna Market on Ring Road kept the market shut for five days to protest against private security personnel and a gang from Jharkhand who stole textile products worth Rs4 crore from their shops.
The gang members target shops and godowns in the textile markets during evening hours when traders are busy with inward supply of dyed and printed fabrics from textile mills. They lift a few takas (bundles) of finished fabrics from the stack and escape. Traders said a finished bundle of dyed and printed fabrics is 100 metres long and priced between Rs3,500 and Rs5,000. Ninety per cent of traders purchase huge amount of unaccounted stock of finished fabrics. So when theft takes place, many traders do not have any record of the goods stolen.
The bundles of finished fabrics coming from textile mills are stacked up in the gangway on each floor of the markets because the shops are small. Most of the gang members are hand-in-gloves with security guards posted at the markets. There are 165 textile markets housing more than 75,000 textile shops in the city.
Traders were unable to register police complaints in a few cases recently because they did not have sufficient documents of the stock that they possessed. “Stock verification was never a practice with our traders’ community. After the recent theft at RKT market, many traders have started maintaining stock registers,” said a textile trader at RKT market.