City SP Haren Nath shows a duplicate label on an Amul Shakti bottle at a news meet on Tuesday. Kamrup (metropolitan) deputy commissioner A.K. Absar Hazarika is to his left. Picture by Biju Boro

May 11: The district administration will clamp a ban on the sale of flavoured milk under the brand name Amul Shakti from tomorrow if the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, maker of the Amul brand of products, fails to spell out its stand on “fudging” of labels on Amul Shakti bottles.

“We will prohibit sale of Amul Shakti from tomorrow if the makers of the product do not come up with satisfactory replies to certain queries raised by the investigating agencies within 24 hours,” Kamrup (metropolitan) deputy commissioner A.K. Absar Hazarika told reporters this evening.

Though the public analyst has certified that the tested samples of Amul Shakti were fit for consumption, Hazarika said they still have a strong case as the expiry dates and batch numbers on Amul Shakti bottles were fudged.

He maintained that affixing of counterfeit “property marks” is a punishable crime under the provisions of Packaged Commodity Act.

The company, however, said they were only changing the damaged outer cartons and replacing the damaged labels with “identical” labels. They said only in rare cases had they changed the “best before” date — when they found that the stock was fit for human consumption and in a marketable condition — so as to avoid loss.

Three executives of the company, Mukul Goswami, Prateek Kumar and Moulik Joshi, were arrested on April 11 on charges of fudging expiry dates on bottles of Amul Shakti.

The arrests came after a raid on April 10 on a godown, where labourers were found affixing labels with new expiry dates to bottles that had already run their lease of life.

Police later raided another godown of Amul’s stockist, Continental Transport Company Ltd, near India Carbon in a city suburb and seized over 10,000 cartons of Amul Shakti.

The company’s area sales manager K.P. Chaliha, zonal manager Manoranjan Pani and depot in-charge Apurba Mishra later surrendered before the court. They are now out on bail.

Company agent Kanhaiyalal Bothra is still absconding, city superintendent of police Hiren Nath said.

While the company has maintained that redressing on the bottles was not carried out before April 9, sources associated with the probe claimed that the redressing had been continuing for long.

“This is obvious from the fact that 6,010 cartons, containing 24 bottles each, of Amul Shakti with new labels were found in the godown ready for despatch to various destinations. The redressal of over 1.4 lakh bottles could not have been completed in a single day as claimed by the company,” a source pointed out.