Amid the flutter created by the recently released Bollywood film Udta Punjab over the issue of drug abuse, the Social and Welfare Ministry will soon kick-off a nationwide survey to assess the extent, trend and pattern of drug abuse among people across the country.
The study, which is estimated to cost over Rs 22 crore, will be conducted in collaboration with the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (NDDTC) of AIIMS. It will provide national and state level estimates of proportion and absolute number of people who indulge in drug abuse, sources said.
The two-year-long survey will also map the presence of services and interventions for drug dependent individual and identify the gaps in service delivery.
The last nation-wide survey to assess the drug use in India was conducted in 2001 and its data was published in 2004.
“The earlier survey did not provide any data on prevalence of substance use at the level of different states in India, neither did it provide data on prevalence of drug use among women population. Since then there have been small scale studies focused on specific geographical areas or population. But there have been no nation-wide surveys.
“Thus the exact dimensions of this problem in India remain unknown,” a senior Ministry official said.
The government’s decision to conduct the survey comes in the wake of a recent survey ‘Punjab Opioid Dependence Survey’ (PODS) that estimated that there are about 2.3 lakh opioid-dependent people in the state, which consumes drugs worth Rs 7,500 crore every year.
“Additionally, India is expected to report to international agencies (like United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and World Health Organisation) on questions related to data on extent of substance use in India.
“In such instances, government has to rely on the old survey published in 2004,” he added.
The drugs include all those listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its International Classification of Diseases, 10th Edition (ICD-10) and include categories like alcohol, tobacco, opioids, sedative-hypnotics, cannabis, stimulants, hallucinogens and inhalants, said Dr Atul Ambekar, additional professor at NDDTC and principal investigator of the survey.
“The study will include a household survey to determine the proportion of people who use drugs and people who are drug dependent,” Ambekar said.