Her daughter got admitted in Std XI of a top city college in August last year. Her husband has been suffering from a serious illness for the past one year.
Pratima Kailas Prasad, 40, needed lots of money to get her husband treated at a top private hospital in the city. She needed the dough to provide for her daughter’s education. But her only source of income was her food stall at Guru Tegh Bahadur Nagar, Sion.
Prasad started dealing in drugs. She peddled the dope mostly to youngsters who pretended that they had come to buy food from her stall. Wrapped with the food came small packets — of 10 or 20 gram each — of marijuana.
The Bandra unit of the Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) was tipped off
about this on Tuesday. A team was dispatched to raid Prasad’s food stall on Tuesday afternoon. The sleuths found small packets of marijuana stacked away in a recess inside her stall. They went to her home too, and recovered 40kg marijuana from there.
An ANC official said that Prasad sold the drug in very small amounts. So, it was easy for students to buy from her. It was easy for her to hand over the dope to the youngsters by concealing the packets of marijuana in the food wrappers. Many saw her doing that, but nobody got wiser, till an ANC source saw through her masquerade.
A senior ANC official said, “During interrogation, she told us that she got into this business last year after her husband got seriously ill. The money she made selling food was not enough to take care of his medical expenses. Plus she had to provide for her daughter’s education.”
She came to know of a person from Andhra Pradesh who supplied marijuana in bulk to peddlers in the city, and got in touch with him. Prasad split the drug into small plastic packets and stored them in her store. She bought a small packaging machinery to make the small packets.
The ANC officer said that Prasad’s business prospered in the past few months, and she started getting large consignments of marijuana delivered at her home to meet the growing demand.
