Cracking down on drug networks is necessary but not sufficient. Kashmir needs jobs, counselling and severed supply chains to win this war.
The numbers from the NCORD meeting are, in their own way, impressive. Over 700 arrests in a quarter, properties worth crores attached, a notorious trafficker neutralised in Prithvipur, the security grid is visibly in motion. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha’s 100-day deadline has injected urgency into a system not always known for it.
Yet the architecture of this crisis was never purely criminal. An estimated 360 kilograms of heroin, drone-delivered across the border, did not find 500 buyers because policing failed. It finds them because despair made the market. Jammu and Kashmir’s youth unemployment, among the highest in the country, creates the idle hours and the fractured futures that drug networks expertly colonise. No raid addresses that vacancy.
The prosecution record is telling. Of 134 commercial-quantity cases in 2025, acquittals outnumbered convictions, broken custody chains, absent witnesses, and delayed forensic reports. Enforcement without courtroom follow-through is a revolving door. Meanwhile, 29 teachers are named in NDPS cases. When the classroom itself is compromised, the preventive firewall is gone.
The supply side compounds this further. Heroin arriving via drone from across the border and through Kartarpur corridors is a geopolitical problem, not merely a policing one. Disrupting it requires diplomatic and intelligence architecture that extends well beyond the jurisdiction of any district superintendent.
What the NCORD data does not show, and what must be built in parallel, is a credible, funded pipeline of rehabilitation, mental-health counselling, and economic opportunity. The three-year Comprehensive Plan being formulated is the right instinct. But plans without budgets are wishes. Kashmir’s young do not need more raids to witness. They need a reason to refuse the first offer.
