Ahmedabad: In a significant crackdown on the illegal trade of banned ‘analogue paneer,’ officials from the Health and Food Department of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) seized 408 kg of the counterfeit dairy product during an early morning operation on Friday, exposing a racket that had been smuggling the banned item into the city from other states.The action follows a statewide ban imposed by the state govt on Aug 6, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of ‘analogue paneer’ across Gujarat.Acting on tip-offs that consignments of the banned product were being routed into the city via private buses and vans in the early morning hours, AMC officials mounted a surveillance operation at the private bus parking area in Maninagar, near Devti Garden. There, they intercepted two luxury vans bearing Arunachal Pradesh registration, which were found to be carrying the fake paneer mislabelled as ‘low-fat paneer’ to evade detection.AMC’s deputy health officer Dr Tejas Shah said two individuals from Naroda and Maninagar had come to purchase the seized stock at Rs 240 per kg — well below the printed MRP of Rs 400-450 per kg — a price gap that officials say points to the scale of profit driving the racket.Investigations traced the manufacturing units supplying the consignment to Jodhpur and Pali in Rajasthan. The entire 408 kg lot was barred from sale, and samples were drawn from every batch for laboratory testing.Shah added that the department was now working to identify the intended buyers of the seized consignment and that raids would extend to the premises of both sellers and buyers linked to the racket.He described the pattern as an emerging modus operandi in which illegal stock is ferried into the city in luxury vans or buses during the pre-dawn hours.
