The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) raided a goods train at Bachhwara railway station in Bihar on Wednesday and seized 450 cartons of codeine-based cough syrup worth around Rs 2 crore.

The consignment was being taken from Gujarat to Tripura, perhaps to be diverted to Bangladesh where it is widely used as a substance of abuse.

NCB Bihar and Jharkhand zonal director Abhishek Anand led the raiding team, which prized open three containers of the goods train and seized the consignment. There were over 90,000 bottles of cough syrup manufactured by a multinational drug manufacturing company.

“We had received intelligence inputs that a large consignment of codeine-based cough syrup was being sent through a goods train from Gujarat to Tripura. Accordingly, we planned to intercept and seize it. We took the help of railway officials in the operation,” an NCB official said.

The agency sources said that the goods train was stopped and segregated at Bachhwara railway station in Begusarai district with the help of railway officials to ensure that the train traffic was not affected.

The consignment was kept among packets of floor and wall tiles being sent in the containers to avoid detection and the officials had to labour hard to get it out. The seized cough syrup was a combination of triprolidine hydrochloride and codeine phosphate.

“We are further investigating the matter. The cough syrup consignment was possibly being taken to Tripura for being diverted to Bangladesh,” the NCB official said.

Codeine is a painkiller in the category of opiates and works on the central nervous system to block pain signals.