Highlighting the gravity of the drugs menace in Punjab, Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Tuesday sought the intervention of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh for directing the Border Security Force (BSF) to take more effective measures to deter the trans-border drug flow on the international border.
In a letter to Rajnath Singh, the Chief Minister pleaded that the hands of State Government must be strengthened in its ongoing war against drugs. He apprised the Union Home Minister that major component of drugs transiting through Punjab were the trans-border consignments pushed from across the Indo-Pak border in the Punjab sector. Badal said that during the years of terrorism in the 1980s, the border has been fenced but there were some riverine gaps in the fencing.
“Interrogation of arrested smugglers and other inputs have revealed strong connections between the trans-border smugglers on the Indian and Pakistani sides. Smugglers belonging to a particular network trust the operatives of same families over generations on both sides of the border, which has led to persistent smuggling across the international border despite best efforts of the central and state agencies,” he said.
The Chief Minister said that in recent times, the use of Samjhauta Express railway link and the Indo- Pak bus service for dispatch of narcotic consignments have increased. He further said that Samjhauta Express has been particularly vulnerable to novel methods adopted by Pak smugglers by shaping the narcotic contrabands as ropes and using these to tie the wagons in order to avoid detection. Badal further said that the use of passengers as drug couriers and their baggage for heroin consignments has also come to notice.
Badal said though BSF has played an active role in combating trans-border smuggling of narcotic drugs yet the IJow of heroin from across the international border continues with seizures being affected regularly by different agencies. He said that it shows that the efforts made by BSF need to be further intensified so that effective plugging of the 553 km international border with Pakistan was ensured.
The CM said the state police have conducted a systematic exercise to understand the end- to-end network of drug trafIJcking from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Punjab to outside the state and further, as also distribution within the state. There has been an exponential increase in the seizures — heroin seizures have gone up IJve-fold from 101 kg in 2011 to 520 kg in 2014 (upto November 17).
The seizures of poppy husk have increased more than three times from 758 quintals in 2011 to 2366 quintals in 2013. There has been a very high increase in the number of arrests and the number of FIRs registered under the NDPS Act in the State.