Mann seeks Rs 600-crore aid from Centre for fighting drug menace
Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann on Saturday sought Rs 600-crore financial assistance from Union Home Minister Amit Shah to fight drug menace and setting up special courts under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.
Participating through video-conferencing in the regional conference on “Drug trafficking and national security”, the CM sought one-time financial assistance of Rs 600 crore for 10 years to create special NDPS courts and recruitment of public prosecutors and other supporting staff.
As on January 1 this year, 35,000 NDPS cases were pending in sessions courts. At present, a sessions court takes around seven years to complete the trial in a case. In the next five years, this average disposal time will increase from seven years (35,000 pending cases) to 11 years (55,000 pending cases), he said.
To clear the pendency in the next five years, the state needed to create 79 NDPS special courts and the appointment of 79 public prosecutors along with the supporting staff for these courts, the CM said.
He also requested Shah to ensure generous funding from the National Fund for Control of Drug Abuse (Chapter 7-A of the NDPS Act) for the Anti-Narcotics Task Force (ANTF), live monitoring systems for six districts adjoining India-Pakistan border, purchase of equipment for technical surveillance, systems for jamming 5G signal in prisons, running de-addiction centres, AI surveillance systems, special prison for drug traffickers and assistance for anti-drug awareness campaigns.
Mann said the state had also sought Rs 2,829 crore through the 16th Finance Commission, which should be approved at the earliest for effective law enforcement and upgrading infrastructure and logistics support of the ANTF and prisons.
He said the state faced insurgency in the late seventies and eighties, and now it was fighting a proxy war with Pakistan to thwart drug trafficking. Mann said the 552-km International Border with Pakistan was porous, marked by a fencing gap of around 43 km and a riverine gap of 35 km, which makes the state vulnerable to cross-border drug trafficking.
In the past 2.5 years, the state government had registered around 31,500 cases under the NDPS Act in which 43,000 accused were arrested and 3,000 kg heroin, 2,600 kg opium and pharmaceutical drugs worth Rs 4.3 crore were seized from them.
