There are no X-ray machines, instruments or sniffer dogs to detect the presence of drugs, pistols, air rifles etc in consignments at the foreign post office (FPO) at ITO in Delhi, customs officials said.
Customs officials said the FPO which is a custom bound infrastructure is majorly controlled by the postal department. Citing an example an official said, “If the postal department gives us 100 consignments to examine and in actual there are 110, who will take the responsibility of the rest. Mostly the contraband is hidden under a lot of other articles. Without proper checking devices and specialised training, how can we identify them,” said the official adding, there is a need for proper online records of goods.”
At the FPO, any van or car with consignments are allowed in by the security guard, who is also an employee of the postal department and the customs officials are not informed at that time so that a random check can be conducted.
“We are not informed about the number of consignments that are received by the postal department and when they give the goods to us for examination, we don’t get a proper list of the goods from them that we would examine,” said the official adding, we are given the goods at bulk and manually it is very difficult to find out in which nook and corner of the consignments, the contraband is generally hidden,”
In other custom bound offices, without a customs officer present, consignments arriving at the office are stopped till the officer
comes to work.
“For example, if a car with consignments arrive at 9pm and the duty customs official has left home and would come next day morning, the car would have to wait till next morning. Such is not the case in Delhi’s FPO” said the official.
It is interesting to note that on asking about the detection devices, the officials said the post office has no X-ray machines, dog squads or machines to detect drugs adding that the equipment need to be provided by the customs department but they have been sitting on it.
Talking about how smugglers pass on their consignment, the official said,” The one who is smuggling, tells the postal department that his goods have clothes or flower vases and the postal department passes on the goods for examination by giving ‘personal item’ tag on it.”
Over 50 air rifles, pistols and cartridges have been seized from Delhi Foreign Post Office in past few months, a senior customs official said. As per rules, only those who have licence from national and state rifle associations can import air rifles or pistols.
On Tuesday, three consignments were checked by customs officials who found foreign-brand cigarettes and memory cards in them. Two consignments had 168 cartons of cigarettes of brands like Benson and Hedges, Dunhill, Pine. The value of these cigarettes is assessed to be worth Rs 3.13 lakh.
In the third parcel, 4,320 memory cards of 8 GB capacity each were seized by the customs officials. The parcels had come from Hong Kong, officials said.
