Ludhiana, March 12
If you think vegetables, roots and fruits are only for eating, think again! Ingenious inmates in jails across the state are increasingly using these natural products to smuggle drugs or money into the secured four walls of the prisons.

In Ludhiana Central Jail alone, inmates have been caught using onions, jimikand, cauliflower, bamboo shoots, melons and capsicum, among others, as means to hide drugs, both in tablet or powder form, besides money inside the jail.

With such usage, the age-old battle of wits between the inmates and the jail officials to outsmart each other for smuggling or checking the booty is becoming more and more inventive.

Especially when the inmates keep on devising new methods after one or the other is caught by the officials. Apart from vegetables, inmates have also improvised ghee tins, slings of bags, stitching of towels and drawstrings of underwears to sneak in drugs and money.

Inquiries by The Tribune have revealed that one of the most popular methods of smuggling opium in the jail is by stacking it in a polythene and hiding in the anus is still continuing despite many having been already caught in the act.

Jail officials, wishing anonymity, revealed such instances had come up in Ludhiana, Amritsar and Patiala Central Jails.

But what has astonished the officials is the use of vegetables. A few days ago, a man was caught using cauliflowers for smuggling drugs. He had returned from parole and brought cauliflowers with him.

He had scooped the flower out, cut its base, stacked drugs in it and fixed the flower over it with a glue. Unfortunately for him, an official found the flower unusually hard fixed.

Just yesterday, jail officials were shocked to their bones, to recover eight small paper packets of charas, hidden inside eight onions. The onions were given to two murder accused inmates, Purshotam and Somay, by one visitor Swaran Singh.

During the checking of the barracks, a jail official found the drugs when he casually shook one of the onions. He found the inner part was scooped out and the upper refixed. Another inmate smuggled in hollow capsicums filled with drugs.

"We have been recovering tablets, drugs and money from pickles, desi ghee, refined oil, panjiri, curd, milk but the use of vegetables and fruits is a stunner," said deputy superintendent of Central Jail S. P. Khanna. The biggest haul was when a Payal resident Jagtar Singh improvised two 15-kg tins to smuggle 10,000 intoxicating tablets into the jail for his drug addict son, Gagandeep Singh. Both are in jail now.

"Drugs like charas, poppy husk, opium, smack apart from intoxicating tablets, especially Lomotil popularly known as 10 number tablets, are the most favourite," said Khanna.

Another inmate, Ramanand, who has a dubious record of escaping five times from the custody of the police or jail officials, attempted to bring money stacked in bamboo shoots which were hidden in the sling of a bag he was carrying.

While smuggling of drugs is easily understood as the need for the addicts incarcerated in the jail, the sneaking in of money raises many questions. Primarly, the money is used to bribe the jail officials for getting drugs, or extra benefits. Officials deny this but the very fact that the inmates are taking such risk to smuggle money suggests there are some ready palms waiting to be greased.