Sustaining Nasha Mukt Abhiyaan

Jammu and Kashmir's 100-day Nasha Mukt Abhiyaan has given the UT something it sorely needed: proof that a determined, coordinated campaign against narcotics can yield results. Over that hundred-day window, more than 2,500 traffickers were arrested, close to 1,431 kilograms of narcotics were seized, and assets worth upwards of Rs188 crore were confiscated, choking off the finances that sustain trafficking networks. These are not modest numbers. They represent months of unglamorous, often dangerous work by police units and District Administrations across difficult terrain. That the PM has now built on this foundation by launching the hundred-week "Nasha Mukt Yuva for Viksit Bharat Sankalp" campaign is a natural and welcome escalation - an acknowledgement that only a nationwide campaign is needed to eradicate the drug menace.

But the very scale of the problem the campaign now confronts is a reminder that narcotics cannot be defeated by any single department acting alone. Drugs have penetrated schools, colleges, neighbourhoods and even rural panchayats. Such saturation cannot be reversed by policing alone, however energetic. It demands a genuinely multi-pronged response, with each institution doing the part only it can do. Policing must remain the frontline, and rightly so - it is the police who disrupt supply chains, execute seizures and detain habitual offenders. But once a trafficker is arrested, the fight shifts to the courtroom, and this is where the system has often been slowest. The establishment of special courts for NDPS cases, alongside sustained capacity building for investigating officers and prosecutors, is therefore not a peripheral administrative detail but central to whether enforcement actually translates into conviction. An arrest that does not end in a sustainable prosecution is, in the long run, wasted effort. Equally, the Law Department's move to examine other statutes - the GST Act, the MSME Act, laws governing shops, establishments and tourism trade - against traffickers, alongside scrutiny of bank accounts and financial trails, shows an understanding that narcotics is fundamentally an economic crime as much as a criminal one. Hit the money, and the incentive structure begins to change.

Yet none of this addresses the demand side, where healthcare and rehabilitation come in. Addiction is a medical condition, and treating it as anything less condemns recovering users to relapse. This is why the Government's insistence on standard treatment protocols, adequate stocks of de-addiction medicine at every health institution from primary centres to medical colleges, and trained counsellors embedded in schools and self-help groups matters as much as any seizure figure. A rehabilitation policy piloted in select districts before wider rollout, backed by an integrated platform to track recovering individuals, is a sensible way to ensure that this scaffolding is actually built rather than merely announced.Education and Information Departments carry perhaps the least glamorous but most durable responsibility: shaping attitudes before addiction takes hold. Awareness that fades once a campaign ends achieves little. What is required is a continuous, year-round curriculum of sensitisation running through schools, NSS and NCC units, panchayats and youth clubs - sustained long after the hundred weeks are over.

The Government's decision to give departments a free hand - whether that means impounding driving licences, cancelling vehicle registrations, revoking passports, freezing bank accounts or withdrawing security cover from identified offenders - signals a welcome seriousness of intent. It tells traffickers that the state will use every lever available, not merely the ones that make headlines.

The lessons of J&K's own hundred-day campaign now point to the next phase. Border districts, through which narcotics enter, deserve particular vigilance, given the UT's location amid porous frontiers. So do the districts already most heavily affected, where the rot needs to be stemmed before it spreads further. That drug trafficking persists even in countries imposing the death penalty for it is a sobering reminder that this trade will not be legislated out of existence; it will only be checked through relentless, adaptive, ground-level implementation.

The Chief Secretary's review at the 18th NCORD meeting and his insistence on regular follow-up are timely precisely because campaigns tend to lose momentum once the initial enthusiasm fades. J&K has shown what coordinated resolve can achieve in a hundred days. The task now is to sustain that resolve for as long as it takes.