In India, following cultural norms, Indian women wear heavy, pure gold chains. With this trend, there has been an increase in incidents of chain snatching too. 
While anti-chain snatching squads are deployed to curb the offense, once the robber snatches the chain from the victim’s neck, he tends to swallow it to avoid being caught with it. In Mumbai, the Commercial Capital of India, police has been using bananas to recover the stolen gold chains from the thieves’ intestines.
Lately, an accused, Gopi R. Ghaware snatched a woman’s 25 gms gold chain (worth about $1,200) and took off. However, as the woman screamed, some passersby gave a chase and pinned him down. Within minutes, the patrolling police caught hold of the thief and took him to the hospital to verify if he had swallowed the piece of jewelry, to escape public wrath.
When an x-ray revealed that the stolen chain was lying in his stomach, police arranged for a basketful of bananas and forced Ghaware to eat them till the wee hours. High in fiber and a natural bulk-producing laxative, bananas helped the robber to flush out the chain from his digestive system with ease. Sadly the chain had to literally go through a lot of shit to be returned back to its respectful owner.
Also it is known, that this is not the first time Mumbai police has gone bananas to retrieve stolen goods swallowed by thieves. This primitive method, which is not a scientific way to solve the problem is resorted to cut down the cost of recovery process. While an endoscopy is a much better alternative to retrieve something from a person’s stomach, it would require a gastroenterologist which would raise the cost. Hence going with the bananas is considered to be the cheapest and the simplest way, although the dirtiest too.
