Three people have been booked in Mumbai for allegedly trying to extort money from a 62-year-old man and damaging his vehicle after he refused to pay them in return for allowing him to run his milk distribution business smoothly.
According to police, Ramdas Shinde from Tardeo owns four milk dispensers and employs a driver and two workers for each of his vehicles. His employees leave Tardeo between 9 and 11 pm every day and collect milk packets from Gokul Dairy in Navi Mumbai’s Vashi area. The milk is meant to be distributed among residents from Colaba to Tardeo.
“The employees usually start distributing milk to the customers at 3 am every morning and they often reach Tardeo around 1 am after collecting the milk packets from Vashi,” said a police officer. “For those two hours, the employees park their tempos near the Lotus Jetty bus stop in Worli and wait for a while before they start distributing milk.”
Around 2.24 am on May 11, Shinde got a call from an unknown person who said that he had illegally parked his four milk vans and that he would have to pay money to park the vehicles there.
“Shinde was told that he will have to pay Rs 1,000 for each vehicle every month. He was further told that if he pays them the money, nobody will even touch his four vehicles. The complainant told them that he would talk to them in the morning,” the police officer said.
As the accused were not pleased with Shinde’s response, two of them allegedly attacked one of his milk vans parked near the Lotus Jetty bus stop.
“Around 2.30 am on the same day, I got a call from a driver and he informed me that two bike-borne persons had attacked him,” read the complainant’s statement to the police.
The police said the two accused initially threatened Shinde’s staff and asked them to convey their message to him. However, when they asked the duo to meet Shinde and resolve the dispute, they broke the milk van’s wiper and windshield.
Shinde later lodged a complaint at the Tardeo police station, where a case under Indian Penal Code sections 385 (extortion), 427 (mischief), 506 (criminal intimidation) and 34 (common intention) was registered.
“We have started scrutinising CCTV footage and the call data record of the accused. We will soon trace and arrest them,” the police officer said.
