The Special Operations Team (SOT), Shamshabad along with the Shamirpet police and officials of agriculture department busted spurious seeds racket and took seven people into custody. The police also seized seeds and other material worth Rs 52 lakh from them.

The arrested persons are identified as K Srinivas (Shamirpet), P Mahender (Kukatpally), Mohd Hussain (Sangareddy), S Ramulu (Sadasivpet), C Venkatesh (Sadashivpet), C Venkat Reddy (Vikarabad) and Rama Chandraiah (Shadnagar). Another two persons -- Mouleshwar Reddy and Ramanjaneyulu, both natives of Kurnool were absconding.

The police said that Srinivas, a diploma holder in agricultural studies and an MBA graduate worked as a marketing executive in Hyderabad and as a regional manager at a seed company in Karnataka up to 2008. He later set up his own unit, Vikas Bioscience Pvt Ltd in Shamirpet in 2015. Srinivas then planned to prepare spurious seeds of cotton, maize and paddy for easy money-making.

He developed contacts with several traders and started to supply the spurious seeds to traders and farmers.