NEW DELHI: Union home minister Amit Shah Tuesday said India’s war on drugs will now be waged at the district level, establishing the local administrative unit as the primary battlefield to dismantle illicit networks.Inaugurating the third National Conference of Anti-Narcotics Task Force (ANTF) heads of states and UTs in Delhi, Shah outlined the district-centric strategy, giving an operational break-up for targeting trafficking operations with a ground-up approach. “Under the new framework, districts nationwide will be categorised into three distinct clusters based on their role in the narcotics supply chain — drug manufacturing or entry points, transportation corridors, and high-consumption districts,” Shah said.Correspondingly, enforcement agencies will execute a simultaneous, three-level attack against drug cartels, identifying their primary touchpoints, inter-state distribution systems and local sales networks operating within individual districts. State police forces have been instructed to integrate the conversion of raw information into actionable intelligence directly into their daily organisational culture.To ensure tangible results, Shah mandated an immediate shift across all state ANTFs, seeking a transition from routine meetings to active missions, from simple reporting to proven results, from a seizure-centric mindset to total network dismantling and from initial case registration to final court conviction.
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Reiterating India’s resolute stance to not allow a single gram of drugs to enter or exit the country, Shah expressed confidence that this synchronised grassroots strategy will secure complete victory and achieve a ‘Nasha Mukt Bharat’ by 2029.Shah also directed police departments to abandon surface-level drug seizures in favour of comprehensive backward and forward investigations, financial auditing and tracing of digital links to choke cartel funding. He emphasised the aggressive application of PIT-NDPS Act alongside tight coordination with public prosecutors from investigation to conviction.On emerging global threats, Shah called for specialised ‘out-of-the-box’ officer teams in every state to tackle synthetic drugs, precursor chemical diversion, dark-net markets, crypto transactions and dead-drop delivery systems. Furthermore, he mandated a dedicated campaign to deport and blacklist foreign drug offenders operating in India, while tracking and extraditing overseas fugitives supplying drugs into the country.