Kerala has always prided itself for its high literacy rate and the state has also been confident in the fact that its crime-reporting figures are more thorough and reliable, compared with others.
So, there is a cause for real worry when a cursory glance at the Kerala Police’s crime statistics for cases under special and local laws from 2008 to March 2018 show that one category of cases is on an alarming upward trajectory: cases registered under the NDPS Act.
The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act is the main statute governing drug-related cases in the country. From a total of 508 cases registered in 2008, cases under the NDPS Act in Kerala have risen steadily over the years. In 2017, the provisional figure of cases filed was 9,242, and the first three months of 2018 saw 2,391 drug-related cases being filed.
Excise Commissioner Rishiraj Singh had raised eyebrows in 2016 when he said Kerala could find itself in the same situation as Punjab was in with respect to drug trafficking and abuse within five years. The Crime in India-2016 report of the National Crime Records Bureau, which was released in late 2017, noted that Kerala’s incidence rate for NDPS cases (cases per lakh people) was 16.6 per cent, second only to Punjab’s 20.2 per cent.
The government and media have, over the years, highlighted various aspects of the drug problem in Kerala by looking at types of drugs being abused and vulnerable groups. For example, the rising population of migrant labourers has been considered a part of the problem, given the proximity of their home states (typically Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha) to porous borders with Bangladesh, which facilitates drug smuggling. In another example, the recent murder of a Latvian tourist near Kovalam had drawn attention to the work of drug peddlers in prominent tourist spots of Kerala.
However, according to activists of the Fourth Wave Foundation, an NGO that is working to ‘empower’ children to say no to drugs, Kerala may be missing the proverbial forest for the trees as far as the drug trade is concerned.
Diana Joseph, who is a director at the Fourth Wave Foundation, says that children are increasingly used as drug ‘mules’ to ferry drugs in Kerala and the stereotype of elaborate ‘drug routes’ is practically irrelevant as young addicts in the state have been known to brew their own ‘cocktails’ with indigenous plants and other easily available substances with the help of the internet.
Moreover, the media and government machinery has primarily focussed on an ‘enforcement-centred’ approach to the drug problem, with a focus on number of people arrested and weight of drugs seized. However, estimating, let alone reporting, the extent of the drug problem among children is difficult when the target population is often as young as 10 years as families and schools still remain hesitant to acknowledge the existence of a problem.
The Fourth Wave Foundation, which primarily works with government schools in Kerala, claims to have worked with 60 institutions in 2017. Its data showed nearly 8 per cent of students it interacted with needed counselling or medical intervention for drug-related issues. While Kochi is considered the city that is most seriously affected by the drug problem, the Fourth Wave Foundation claims it has also been approached by institutions in Kannur, Kozhikode and Thiruvananthapuram for assistance.
While the foundation has found the government to be receptive to the need to counter the drug menace, it has yet to acknowledge the extent of the problem. And therein lies the tragedy as Joseph warns about the risk of inaction on drugs in Kerala: “An entire generation will be at risk.”