A latest report submitted to the high court by the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team has revealed that an Uttarakhand-based dairy firm allegedly supplied fake ghee worth Rs 250 crore to the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), even after the Telugu Desam Party-led coalition came to power in Andhra Pradesh.
According to the report, the CBI-led SIT investigation has revealed that the four containers of ghee stocks adulterated with animal fat allegedly supplied by Tamil Nadu-based AR dairy and subsequently rejected by the TTD in July last year, were supplied back to the Tirupati trust by Uttarakhand-based Bhole Baba Dairy promoters through Vyshnavi dairy in August 2024, two months after Naidu came to power.
During the course of the ongoing investigation, when FSSAI officials and the SIT team inspected the AR dairy plant at Dindigul and questioned about the four rejected ghee tankers, it emerged that the four ghee tankers never returned to the AR dairy plant.
When the SIT sleuths tried to trace out the four ghee tankers, which went missing inconspicuously, it emerged that the four ghee tankers, which were rejected and returned by the TTD on July 25, 2024 based on the NDDB reports confirming adulteration of ghee with animal fat, were diverted to a local stone crushing unit located close to Vyshnavi Dairy plant, where the labels were changed and the fake ghee was reprocessed to look better.
In August 2024, Vyshnavi Dairy supplied the same rejected ghee back to the Tirupati trust, pretending it was a new batch. The same ghee was later used to prepare the sacred laddu prasadams.
“So, the Tirupati laddu prasadam was made with adulterated ghee even after Naidu came to power,” sources said.
The probe revealed that Bhole Baba Organic Dairy, which never procured a drop of milk or butter from anywhere, managed to supply 6.8 million kg of ghee to TTD.
The details of the fraud came to light after the arrest of Ajay Kumar Sugandh, who supplied various chemicals such as monodiglycerides and acetic acid ester to Bhole Baba Organic Dairy.
According to the report, the dairy, run by Pomil Jain and Vipin Jain in Uttarakhand, set up a fake desi ghee factory. They forged milk purchase and payment records to make it appear as though they were producing real ghee.
Even after their company, Bhole Baba Dairy, was blacklisted in 2022, they continued to sell fake ghee to the Tirupati Devasthanam by using other dairies’ names, such as Vyshnavi Dairy (Tirupati), Mal Ganga (Uttar Pradesh), and AR Dairy Foods (Tamil Nadu).
In September 2024, a major controversy broke out over the Tirupati Laddu after Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu claimed that the previous government had allowed adulterated ingredients to be used.
According to media reports, he said the laddus may have contained beef tallow, fish oil, and pig lard. A lab test by the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) found traces of foreign fats, which caused serious concern.
Officials later traced the issue to a batch of ghee from a Tamil Nadu dairy, but said that any ghee that failed quality checks had been removed before it was used to make the laddus.
