At least 28 people have died and 60 others have become ill from drinking spiked alcohol in western India.

Senior government official Mukesh Parmar said the deaths occurred in the Ahmedabad and Botad districts of Gujarat state, where the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol is prohibited.

Ashish Gupta, Gujarat state’s police chief, said several suspected bootleggers who were involved in selling the spiked alcohol have been detained.

Deaths from illegally brewed alcohol are common in India, where illicit liquor is cheap and often spiked with chemicals such as pesticides to increase potency.

Illicit liquor has also become a hugely profitable industry across India where bootleggers pay no taxes and sell enormous quantities of their product to the poor at a cheap rate.

In 2020, at least 120 people died after drinking spiked alcohol in India’s northern Punjab state.