Surat, Dec 2 (PTI) A 16-year-old boy from Rajasthan was detained by Gujarat"s Surat police after they seized opium worth Rs 1.98 lakh from his school bag which was supposed to be delivered to a local person, an official said on Thursday. The Class 9 student, a resident of Itawa village in Chittorgarh district of Rajasthan, who was allegedly hired as a drug peddler, was held on Wednesday soon after he arrived in a bus at Niyol check post on the outskirts of Surat city, he said. Preliminary investigation has revealed that the boy was hired by one Gopal Sharma, a native of Itawa village, to deliver the contraband to an unidentified person in Surat, Assistant Commissioner of Police B J Chavda said. "Based on a specific tip-off, police kept a watch at Niyol check post and detained the boy as soon as he alighted from a bus. We found 1.98 kg of opium worth Rs 1.98 lakh in his possession. He had kept the contraband in his school bag and reached here in the bus from Chittorgarh," the official said. "The boy told the police that Gopal Sharma from his village had asked him to deliver the opium to a person here. We are yet to extract details about the receiver. Things will be clearer once we nab Sharma," Chavda said. The Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) last month said it had seized drugs valued at over Rs 1,900 crore since 2016, and out of these, narcotics worth Rs 900 crore were recovered this year alone in the state. More than 70 people were arrested by the ATS during this period in some of the major cases related to narcotics, the ATS had said, adding that smugglers from Pakistan had been trying to use the Gujarat coast as a transit route to transport narcotics to their destination, especially in the last four years, but all such attempts were foiled. In September this year, in the single largest heroin haul in India, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) had seized around 3,000 kg of the drug, believed to be from Afghanistan and likely worth Rs 21,000 crore in the global market, from two containers at the Mundra port in Gujarat"s Kutch district, officials earlier said. PTI COR PJT GK GK