The traders, to whom the tomatoes belonged, said they would decide on filing a complaint after confronting the driver and the cleaner.
Tomato crates. (iStock)
The suspected “heist” of a truckload of tomatoes that was being transported to Jaipur from Karnataka turned out to be something different.
It was found out on Monday, 31 July, that the driver allegedly sold the load elsewhere!
Two tomato traders from Karnataka’s Kolar district have now left for Ahmedabad in Gujarat after coming to learn that the driver of the truck with an 11-tonne tomato consignment to Jaipur in Rajasthan had taken a detour for reasons best known to him and had allegedly sold the tomatoes — currently a precious commodity across the country — to a few traders in Ahmedabad.
The traders told the Kolar police that they would decide on filing a complaint with the Ahmedabad police after confronting the driver and cleaner of the truck about the incident.
Muni Reddy and Bob John Saab — residents of Kolar Town — approached the Kolar Town Police Station on Sunday afternoon after they lost contact with the truck.
According to the traders, truck driver Anwar Khan switched off his mobile phone, and they were also unable to track the Global Positioning System (GPS) signal of the vehicle, which belongs to Kolar-based Mehak Travels.
When the Jaipur-bound truck went missing on Saturday evening, the two traders suspected that it was another “heist”, much like the recent incidents of theft of tomato loads after the prices of the vegetable skyrocketed.
The Kolar police took up the preliminary investigation after the duo complained that the truck with tomatoes worth ₹21 lakh had gone missing.
Representatives at the Kolar Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC), from where the produce was sent, pegged the price of tomatoes at ₹160 per kg.
According to the traders’ complaint, the truck — loaded with 750 crates — left the local mandi in Kolar on 27 July.
The consignment was scheduled to reach its destination in Jaipur by midnight of 29 July — Saturday — for supply to a local vegetable market in the city.
The truck, which was being tracked through GPS, had apparently covered around 1,800 km since it left Kolar when it went dark.
When the vehicle did not reach its destination in Jaipur by Saturday night, the traders tried to contact the driver but his phone was switched off, a senior police officer said.
“Based on a complaint received from one of the traders, we have initiated a preliminary inquiry into the matter. No FIR has been registered yet since we had to verify whether the driver had met with any accident on the way to their destination or if the tomatoes got stolen. So, an inquiry was initiated and we collected details from the complainant in the matter,” the police officer said.
Preliminary inquiries revealed that the tomatoes were delivered instead at a local vegetable market in Ahmedabad, the officer said, adding that this could be due to some miscommunication as well.
Muni Reddy’s son Vinay Reddy, who is also a tomato trader, confirmed that the vehicle had an in-built GPS tracking system.
Reddy said that he last spoke to the driver around 9 pm on Saturday, and was assured that the consignment would reach the mandi in Jaipur by 11 pm.
“However, I got to know in the morning that the consignment had not reached the market. When I tried to contact the driver, his phone was switched off. There was no other way to reach him. So, we had to approach the police,” he said.
Reddy said he then informed his acquaintances in Jaipur and subsequently received information from their local sources that the tomatoes had been sold in Ahmedabad.
“We suspect that these tomatoes were sold off by the driver, but we still haven’t been able to get in touch with him. It has also come to our notice that the same truck was not used to transport the consignment to Ahmedabad. We need to get it verified,” he said.
Reddy said that the consignment belonged to two parties and that they were also likely to reach Ahmedabad and file a complaint at the local police station there as well.
Earlier this month, tomatoes worth ₹2.5 lakh were stolen from a farm in the Goni Somanahalli village in the Belur taluk of Karnataka’s Hassan district.
The thieves allegedly decamped with 50-60 bags of tomatoes from a woman farmer’s agricultural field, following which a case of theft was lodged at the Halebeedu Police Station.
In another incident, a couple from neighbouring Tamil Nadu was arrested by the police for hijacking a truck laden with 2.5 tonnes of tomatoes in Bengaluru after faking an accident to extort money.
According to the police, the couple was part of a gang of highway robbers that intercepted Mallesh, a farmer from Hiriyur in the Chitradurga district, at Chikkajala on 8 July. They demanded money claiming that the farmer’s truck had bumped into their car.
The farmer was transporting tomatoes in his Mahindra Bolero jeep to Kolar. When he refused to pay them, the miscreants assaulted him, pushed him out of the truck and drove away with the vehicle.
Based on the complaint lodged by the farmer, the RMC Yard police tracked the movement of the vehicle and zeroed in on the gang.
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