Mandvi cops bust unit making spurious ghee

Surat: A Mandvi police team on Thursday busted an alleged spurious ghee manufacturing unit at Khedpur village near Mandvi in Surat district and seized 810kg of adulterated ghee worth around Rs 6.65 lakh. Police also found packs of toilet cleaner and tobacco at the unit.Police said the product was being sold under the brand name "Yadugiri Pure Cow Ghee", with packaging that described it as premium quality. During the raid, officers recovered about 97,000 stickers of the brand meant for ghee packs. Based on the number of stickers and containers found, police suspect it to be a large-scale racket. The unit operated from premises in Agreshwar City Point and had been active for the past few months. Investigation revealed that Hemraj Rajpurohit, 39, was allegedly running the operation from his house, police said. From the house, police recovered equipment and materials allegedly used for making and packing the fake ghee, including a gas stove, cooking gas cylinder, two steel containers, an electric weighing scale, synthetic food colour, heat guns, an electromagnetic induction foil capping machine and batch coding and packaging machines. Police also seized plastic bottles of different sizes and various stickers meant for application on the bottles. In addition, police seized around 1,000 toilet cleaner bottles with thousands of stickers, 1,960 tobacco pouches and about 200 litres of acid stored in four barrels. A food and drug control department registration certificate was also found at the site. Police said further investigation is underway to identify the source of raw materials, trace the distribution network and determine whether other products were being repackaged or mislabelled. Samples of the seized items have been sent to a laboratory for testing, after which police will decide their course of action.