Police raid a home-based gutka factory in Surjani Town

Bags of betel nuts, tobacco and lime found at the site.

KARACHI:

In an episode of Shikanja aired on Express News on March 2, police officials raided a house located in a sparsely populated corner of Surjani Town to find that it was being used to run a very unkempt but fully functional factory, which manufactures and sells ‘gutka’.

They arrived at the site to find the front gate of the house locked from inside. Police officials rushed to locate the back door after they heard people trying to escape from the rear of the house.

After following a muddy trail from the back door, they entered the house to find barrels containing bags of chalia [betel nuts], tobacco, chuna [lime], dirt and caustic soda lying on the floor.

These items are churned into small pieces and mixed in a tank. The mixture is poured into another tank containing acid and caustic soda to make it soft and chewable. The softened mixture is then dried, packed in small plastic wrappers and sold to the customer.

The police also found several women, who had been employed to pack gutka in plastic wrappers, huddled in a room on the first floor of the house. In another room, they found six male workers who had been running the little factory. One of them, Iftikhar, is the younger brother of the factory’s owner, Shahzad.



Ifitikar told the police that his brother, Shahzad, who owned the factory, had been giving Rs500 per week in bribes to the police to keep his factory running. “Almost 100 bags, each containing about 1,500 packets of gutka are transported by motorcycles every day,” he confessed to the police.

Iftikhar and his brother, who are residents of Ajmer Town, North Karachi, ran a similar gutka factory there for two years before they had to shut down due to the increasing raids. They started the factory in Surjani Town about six months ago.

According to the police, the cost of producing each packet of the substance is Rs6 and it is sold in the market at Rs10. The brothers were making a small fortune of Rs150,000 to Rs200,000 every day, they added. The police have yet to register any case against them.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 11^th, 2013.