IMPORTANT POINT
Compliance with procedural requirements, preservation and production of seized contraband, and the responsibility of the accused in drug-related offences.

JUDGMENT

1. The appellant herein has been convicted for the commission of an offence under Section 8 of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 and punished under Section 21(c) thereof to suffer rigorous imprisonment for ten years with a fine of Rs. 1 lakh. The judgment of conviction was pronounced on September 5, 2019 and the sentence was also passed on the same date.

2. According to the Customs authorities, following an intelligence report that a truck apparently transporting rice from a Food Corporation of India (FCI) railway siding in Guwahati and travelling to Agartala may also be ferrying drugs, appropriate orders were issued in compliance with the relevant provisions for a search team to be put in place to intercept the vehicle. In the early hours of October 29, 2014, the relevant vehicle was intercepted some 40 km outside Shillong. The case made out by the Customs authorities was that since the vehicle had been stopped in the middle of the highway and it may have not been prudent to conduct a search at the spot, particularly considering the hour of the day, the vehicle was escorted to the Customs office in Shillong while it continued to be driven by the appellant herein.

3. From the evidence adduced before the trial court, it appears that one Andrew Swer of Laban and another Naresh Thakur of Keating Road were called as independent witnesses while the unloading and search operations were conducted and, in the presence of the two witnesses, the unloading of the truck was completed and it was discovered that instead of the full consignment complement of 310 bags of rice that was loaded in the truck at Guwahati as per the consignment note carried on the truck, only 257 bags of rice were on board the vehicle and, in addition, 81 HDPE bags of Phensedyl cough syrup were discovered. Samples were drawn in more than one lot in the presence of the witnesses, they were sealed and signatures of the witnesses obtained on the bags containing the samples. The other bags containing the contraband were also sealed and the signatures of the seizure witnesses were appended thereto. The witnesses proved their signatures in court and testified that they had been called in the early hours of October 29, 2014 and required to be present during the time that the search and seizure operations continued.

4. One of the seizure witnesses did indicate that the unloading operations had commenced by the time he arrived at the spot, but the other seizure witness did not refer to the unloading having commenced before his arrival. On an overall reading of the testimonies of the seizure witnesses, no anomaly is found and the suggestions to the contrary put forth on behalf of the defence were robustly repelled. There is no doubt that some of the tags bearing the signatures of the seizure witnesses were missing, but there is equally no doubt that the relevant bags said to contain the contraband were produced in court and even the bags containing the samples that had been kept in the court's custody were produced at the time of the trial. Since the seizure was of a total amount of 24,000 bottles each containing 100 ml of Phensedyl, the bags containing such goods could not be conveniently housed in any place under the court's custody and were kept deposited in the Customs warehouse or godown. The person in charge of the godown was called as a witness and examined. Such witness testified that both the 257 bags of rice and the 81 bags containing the contraband were deposited but, subsequently, the 257 bags of rice were made over to a representative of the transporter who had been authorised to receive such material. Even such representative of the transporter was examined as witness. There seems little scope for the goods to have been tampered with.

5. An FCI employee was also called as a witness so as to indicate that as per the consignment note, 310 bags of rice had been loaded in the relevant truck at the railway siding in Guwahati and they w