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| NEWS ANALYSIS | | Capt. Amrinder Singh in a dilemma | | His Punjab emerges as major drugs transit point
From B L KAK
NEW DELHI: High-profile Chief Minister of Punjab, Capt. Amrinder Singh, has suddenly adopted a low profile. One of the reasons attributed to the change obviously springs from a barrage of inconvenient queries his administration has been confronted with following the failure of the State to cry a halt to the drug trafficking.
In fact, Punjab has emerged as a major transit point for drugs coming in from Afghanistan to India, which has one of the highest numbers of opium users in the world.
The supply of drugs, especially heroin, has increased in India in the recent years even though illicit opium cultivation has shown a decline, the ‘World Drug Report’ released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says.
The availability and consumption of drugs have increased in Capt. Amrinder Singh's Punjab in the recent years with cities like Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Chandigarh and Patiala emerging as hotspots.
If the report were any guide,the arrival of cocaine, a costly drug, in India has also increased manifold with anti-narcotics sleuths recovering 200 kgs of the contraband so far this year as compared to 14 kgs seized in the last four years.
The mode of drug smuggling and supply in India is also changing rapidly, posing a major challenge to authorities and the primary focus now was to understand their fast-changing modus operandi. “To grapple with the beast, you need to know its shape and form,” said Gary Lewis, the South Asia representative of the UNODC after releasing the report.
Apart from the Punjab route, drugs reach India from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh through the southern and eastern States. According to the report, India has 25 million drug users, which makes the country account for 1/10th of the problem drug users in the world.
Meanwhile Iran has said that it cannot stand the costly affair of stalling drug trafficking if the Western countries refused to assist the campaign against drug trafficking. According to the report, the United States contributed about 700 million dollars to Latin American countries through the UN to be spent in the campaign against drug smuggling.
In the same year, the UN financial contribution to the Islamic Republic of Iran for confronting this ominous phenomenon was less than 10 million dollars, while it is common knowledge that Iran is in a dangerous neighbourhood with its long border with poppy-producing Afghanistan.
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