Plane toilets become newest place to hide and smuggle gold

Smugglers must be feeling a trifle flushed that their efforts to bring in gold are going down the drain in India nowadays. If the seizures of the last few weeks are scrutinised, it seems that the favoured place to stash caches of gold bullion has been airline toilets, taking advantage of the fact that aviation companies use the same aircraft for domestic as well as foreign destinations.

Last week, a plane’s toilet was found to have secreted 240 gold bars, surpassing an earlier haul of 32 bars in Chennai. Both these were, of course, far less than the 280 ingots found in Dhaka in a flight from Dubai. While the commodious nature of this particular amenity in planes must be the reason why it has become the favoured receptacle for contraband gold, it has certainly added a new dimension to the age-old practice of panning for gold.

Customs officials, however, must also be commended for their unerring instinct in divining the places where gold has been ingeniously hidden away, from gadgets and shoes to baggage frames and now toilets. This kind of expertise, honed by experience, is surely what would have stood the authorities in better stead in Unnao. Clearly, these officials would have been more precise about the likelihood of gold hoards in the hinterland than sundry savants — and the Archeological Survey of India.