Officials of the Air Intelligence Unit (AIU) intercepted a passenger flying into Kochi airport in Kerala on an Indigo flight from Doha in Qatar on Wednesday, who was attempting to smuggle gold into the country.
The man, from Koduvally in Kerala's Kozhikode district, had inserted four capsule-shaped packets containing gold weighing 1066.75 grams into his rectum.
The officials of the AIU then had the thankless task of retrieving the capsules, reported Customs officials.
This has, unfortunately, become an all-too-familiar story. On the very same day, officials at Kerala's Calicut airport seized 3.8 kg of smuggled gold from four passengers who arrived at the Calicut international airport from different places in the Gulf, reported The Hindu. Two of those cases were rectal concealments.
On October 7 this year, over 700 grams of gold worth Rs 38.53 lakh being smuggled into the country was seized at Mangaluru International Airport, in Karnataka. The passenger, who arrived by an Air India Express flight from Dubai on Wednesday, had mixed the gold powder in gum and concealed the same in his rectum.
The list of failed, albeit resourceful, attempts to skip having to pay customs duties is long, and predictable. It tends to fluctuate far less than the price of gold on any given day.
Part of the problem is that the demand for gold is unusually high in India. In fact, it is the highest in the world – slightly higher than in China and nearly four times higher than the third-ranked country, the US. That's because gold has a clear cultural and religious importance for many Indians.
It is an incredibly popular asset among all sections of society, for investments, as an inheritance for children, as a gift for weddings in the family, or as a marker for occasions in life or for festivals, such as Diwali. Weddings are the big ticket; they generate approximately 50 per cent of annual gold demand in India, according to the World Gold Council.
As long as that continues, such cases will remain all too familiar.
