LAHORE: Garden Town police have arrested two men accused of supplying kites in Lahore through online orders, seizing more than 200 kites, as the city’s crackdown on the kite trade widens to target distribution networks rather than street-level sellers.
The action was taken on the directions of the DIG Operations, under whose supervision the crackdown against the kite-selling network is continuing.
Police said the suspects, identified as Raza and Bilal, were taken into custody from near Canal Road and Muslim Town.
According to police, the two supplied kites to required locations on the basis of online orders. Investigators said the men had been bringing kites from other districts and supplying them to various areas of Lahore.
More than 200 kites were recovered from the possession of the arrested suspects. Cases have been registered against them and further legal proceedings have begun.
The online-order element is the significant detail. Enforcement in Lahore has historically focused on shops, rooftop sellers and neighbourhood stockists — physical points that can be raided. A model in which kites are ordered remotely and delivered to an address moves the transaction off the street and makes the stock itself harder to locate until it is in transit.
It also explains why recent police action has concentrated on interception points such as Canal Road rather than on markets. The crackdown has run continuously through September, with four people including a police constable arrested with 600 kites in Harbanspura and Bata Pur on 13 September.
Kite flying, and the manufacture, sale, storage and transport of kites and kite string, are regulated in Punjab under the Punjab Prohibition of Kite Flying Act, which provides for imprisonment and fines for manufacture and sale, with enhanced penalties where metallic or chemically coated string is involved.
The prohibition originated in the fatalities caused by sharpened and metal-coated string, which has severed throats of motorcyclists and children, and by electrocution and falls from rooftops. Those deaths remain the reason the restriction exists, and the reason enforcement intensifies ahead of any anticipated festival season.
The arrests come while kite and string manufacturers await the issuance of manufacturing licences in connection with preparations for Basant 2027. As The Lahore Times reported on 13 September, more than 2,500 applications have been submitted and not one licence has been issued in eight days.
That gap creates the enforcement paradox now visible on Lahore’s streets. A regulated manufacturing regime has been signalled but not activated, while demand builds in anticipation of a sanctioned Basant — and the supply filling that demand in the interim is, by definition, unlicensed and therefore prosecutable.
Police say action against the kite trade will continue irrespective of the licensing timeline, since no licence has yet been issued and all current manufacture, supply and sale therefore remains outside the law. The two arrested suspects face proceedings under the relevant sections of the Punjab Prohibition of Kite Flying Act. Police said investigation is continuing into the source districts from which the seized stock was brought into Lahore, and into the order-taking channels used.
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