A firm that had been disqualified and blacklisted from the tender process allegedly supplied adulterated ghee to the Lord Venkateswara Temple through proxies, the Special Investigation Team’s remand report filed in connection with the Tirupati laddu “adulteration” case and accessed by The Indian Express shows.
The report, filed before a local court, states that Bhole Baba Organic Dairy Pvt Ltd was allegedly supplying ghee via its proxies – Vaishnavi Dairy and AR Dairy – despite being backlisted by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD), which manages the temple’s affairs, in 2022. TTD uses 15,000 kilograms of ghee to prepare the famous laddu prasadam.
The remand report was filed on Sunday against four of the accused: Pomil Jain and Bipin Jain, former directors of Bhole Baba Dairy in Roorkee; Apurva Vinay Kant Chawda, CEO of Vaishnavi Dairy, Poonambakkam; and Raju Rajasekharan, the MD of AR Dairy, Dindigul.
According to the remand report, Bhole Baba Dairy used to supply ghee to the TTD at Rs 291 per kg in 2019. It kept supplying ghee until 2022, when the TTD inspected the dairy’s facilities and concluded that its manufacturing practices were “not satisfactory”, disqualifying it from the tender processes.
However, the TTD kept buying ghee from two of the company’s proxies. While Vaishnavi Dairy won a tender to supply ghee in 2020, AR Dairy allegedly fabricated documents to win the tender in March 2024, the remand report states.
According to the remand report, Bhole Baba Dairy allegedly helped its proxies throughout the tender process, including in fabricating documents to qualify for the bid.
As per the tender, while AR Dairy was supposed to manufacture and supply ghee, it procured the ghee from Vaishnavi Dairy, which was in fact procuring it from the blacklisted Bhole Baba Dairy, the remand report says.
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While AR Dairy was supposed to deliver Agmark standard ghee, they fabricated documents to this effect and allegedly supplied adulterated ghee, the report states.
The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) government had claimed last year that Lord Venkateswara Temple’s prasadam, offered to devotees in the form of laddus, was adulterated with animal fat. A five-member team, including two officers from the CBI, two from the Andhra Pradesh government and one from the Food Safety Standards Authority of India, has been probing the case.
The case became a political flashpoint in Andhra Pradesh, with the TDP lashing out at the previous Jagan Mohan Reddy government for “playing with the most pious of offerings in Tirupati.” Reddy’s government was in power in the state between 2019 and 2024.
