Punjab is not defamed by its drug problem. It is let down by the lack of honest numbers

“Nasha hai nahi etthe, badnaam hi zyada kita hoyea,” Bhagwant Mann told his police officers at Phillaur on Friday. The drugs are not here, he said; Punjab has only been defamed. Within hours the Union Home Ministry wrote to his Chief Secretary asking for reports on three drug-linked cases, among them the killing of the anti-drug activist Parvinder Singh Jhota in Mansa.

The Chief Minister is not wrong about everything. But the remark was the wrong one to make in the week Jhota died, and it rests on a claim that nobody, including his own government, can yet test.

Where Mann has a point

Drugs reach Punjab across a border it does not guard. The 50-km belt along the frontier falls to the Border Security Force, which answers to the Centre. Mann noted on Friday that 3,000 kg of drugs had been seized at Gujarat’s Kandla port, also under central control, and that Punjab had paid for its own anti-drone system. Addiction is not a Punjabi trait, and treating the state as the country’s drug capital has a cost: it stigmatises a generation of young people and scares off investment.

It is also true that the Centre has an interest in the story. Punjab votes in early 2027, and the BJP wants to make drugs and law and order the issues.

What the numbers say

Still, the data that do exist do not support denial. In 2023, the latest year in the National Crime Records Bureau’s count, Punjab recorded 89 deaths from drug overdoses, the most of any state for the second year running. Its rate of drug trafficking cases, 25.3 per lakh people, was the highest in India. The state’s own police say they have made 79,784 arrests in their campaign since March 2025. A state that is merely defamed does not arrest that many people.

These are crime and death figures, not a measure of addiction, and they can be read more than one way. More cases may mean more drugs, or simply more policing. That is exactly why a proper count of drug use matters.

The survey nobody has seen

Punjab has one. On 1 April Mann’s government began a household Drug and Socio-Economic Survey of about 65 lakh families, with ₹150 crore set aside for it. “The idea is to understand the drug problem and then make targeted policies which will have better outcomes,” the Chief Minister said. Data collection, first due by June, ran on into the summer. Officials said analysis would take about two more months. Six and a half months after the launch, no findings have been made public.

There were concerns from the start. Enumerators reported that families were unwilling to admit drug use or name sellers. Alcohol, which critics of the survey say is the state’s most common addiction, was left out. A social work professor at Punjabi University said the method broke basic research principles. Those doubts are reasons to publish the method and the results together, so that experts can judge them, not reasons to keep the numbers in a drawer until after an election.

What Punjab should do

First, publish the survey in full, district by district, with its questionnaire, sample and known gaps, before the 2027 campaign begins. If it shows the problem is smaller than feared, Mann’s argument will be stronger for it.

Second, put out overdose deaths and admissions to de-addiction centres every quarter, from hospital records rather than police files.

Third, the Centre should match that openness. The BSF and the Narcotics Control Bureau should publish what is seized along the Punjab border and at ports such as Kandla, so that the argument over who failed can be settled with evidence.

Punjab’s families do not need to be told the problem is imaginary, or that it is all someone else’s fault. They need to know how big it is, where it is worst, and whether what is being done is working.

The reporting behind this view

• 89overdose deaths recorded in Punjab in 2023, the highest of any state
• 25.3drug trafficking cases per lakh people in Punjab in 2023, the highest rate in India
• 65 lakhfamilies in the household drug survey launched on 1 April 2026, whose findings are not yet public