Customs cargo office gets sniffer dog
In a first in the country, the cargo customs office at the Mumbai airport has got a sniffer dog for routine checks and scanning of parcels.
Officers handling passengers at the airport, which falls under a different commissionerate, already have their own dog squad of three canines to keep a tab on drug smugglers.
“Five dogs are currently being trained at the National Training Centre for Dogs (NTCD) at Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. One of them has finished training and has reached the Mumbai airport cargo to begin work,” said a customs officer privy to the development. The dog is a one-year-old purebred male Labrador.
Cargo customs commissioner R. Kapoor confirmed the development. “We have become the first airport cargo division in the country to have a sniffer dog,” he said. Other airports including Delhi Indira Gandhi International (IGI), Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata also have cargo divisions, but without sniffer dogs.
The cargo terminal sees a hectic movement of parcels, couriers and export consignment with around 3,200 packages moving everyday. “The section alone generated a revenue of around `8,000 crore in 2012,” added a customs officer. The need to have a sniffer dog arose when officers seized 22 kg of charas (hashish) on July 4 last year. It was concealed in yams, which was part of a 1,200-kg consignment of fruits and vegetables headed for London. The contraband, packed in polythene bags, was cleverly placed inside the yams’ hollow portion. The seizure was valued to be worth around `1 crore in the international market.
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