Two men are in custody after Indore's Crime Branch found MD drugs stashed inside the dashboard of an electric autorickshaw, police said on Thursday.

The stop happened on MR-4 Road, where a team on routine patrol noticed the pair sitting inside the e-rickshaw and decided to check it out. That decision turned up 14.9 grams of MD drugs tucked into the dashboard, valued at roughly Rs 1.4 lakh. Add the vehicle itself, worth about Rs 1.5 lakh, and the total seizure comes to close to Rs 2.9 lakh.

Police have named the two men as Shadab Khan, who lives in Khajrana, and Sahid Ali Shah, from Chandan Nagar. Both have been booked under Section 8/22 of the NDPS Act, which covers possession and trafficking of banned substances.

For now, they're being questioned. Investigators want to know where the drugs came from and, more importantly, who else might be feeding this particular pipeline. An e-rickshaw with a hollowed-out dashboard suggests some planning went into the concealment, and that's usually a sign there's a supply chain behind a small-time bust like this one, not just two guys acting alone.

This arrest is one entry in what's turning into a fairly long ledger for the year. Crime Branch figures put the count at 145 people arrested across 69 separate NDPS cases in Indore since January 1. The drugs recovered in that stretch add up fast: just over 3 kilograms of MD, more than 28 kilograms of ganja, 500 kilograms of bhang, over 346 grams of brown sugar and 10 grams of cocaine. Factor in the vehicles seized along the way and the number comes to around Rs 3.83 crore.

What that trend line says about Indore's drug traffic is up for the police and, eventually, the courts to establish. What's clear right now is that the city's Crime Branch is treating even routine vehicle checks as a way into bigger networks. An electric rickshaw with a rigged dashboard on an ordinary road stop isn't a small thing if there's a chain of suppliers on the other end of it.

The accused have not been convicted of anything. The case will now move through the usual process, with police questioning expected to determine whether more arrests follow.