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A Tribune Special
Punjab’s parallel economy: illicit drugs trade worth Rs 5,000 crore
Prabhjot Singh
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 26
The annual revenue from the illicit drug trade, one of the biggest criminal enterprises in Punjab, runs into crores of rupees. The bulk of profit originates from the transportation and distribution of drugs to affluent markets of Europe and North America using the border state as the transit point. Only a nominal percentage of total heroin smuggled through Punjab is for the local market.

Seizures made under special laws by security forces, including the Punjab police and the Narcotics Control Bureau, represent only a miniscule of the quantum of illicit trade whose volume in terms of money is perhaps double the size of the official budget of the state.

According to estimates, the illicit drug trade in Punjab these days may well be worth Rs 5,000 cr per annum, which is more than three times the total liquor trade. And the drug trade is perhaps the only one where there are no credit facilities for ultimate consumers— the addicts. Instances of domestic violence have grown with the increased incidence of drug addiction.

"An addict can go to any extent to get money for his or her dose," says Dr Rajeev Gupta, a psychiatrist, revealing that he has known and treated cases where parents have taken loans to buy drugs for their wards. In one case, he says, parents have abandoned their home and taken shelter inside a place of worship as all their three sons are drug addicts.

Drug cartels, admit police officers, have been using a portion of their huge profits to finance and facilitate terrorist and disruptive activities. Besides running a parallel economy, the illicit trade has spawned large money laundering networks as a drain on the state economy. The status of Punjab, originally of a transit zone, has been rapidly changing to a user zone due to affluence.

Heroin, which starts from Afghanistan, at Rs 1 lakh a kg becomes five times costlier on landing in Punjab. When it ultimately reaches its destination in affluent Europe or North America, it is worth Rs 1 cr a kg.

Trading of heroin and smack through Punjab, admit government agencies engaged in anti-drug smuggling operations, alone is worth a few thousand crores a year. Interestingly, when "pandis" go to collect consignments on the Indo-Pak border in Khem Karan, Lopoke or porous Ferozepore sectors, they do not pay anything in return forcostly contraband received. Instead financial transactions, reveal intelligence agencies, are either done through conduits of the major players of the trade in Mumbai or in the Middle- East, especially Dubai. Transactions are done through coded telephonic messages routed through Dubai.

The volume of conventional indigenous drugs is enormously large as can be judged from the seizures made by the Punjab police every year. Bhukki alone would be worth more than Rs 1000 crore. Opium, charas and ganja put together may be more than a few hundred crores.

Other substantial components are psychotropic drugs which again are worth several hundred crores and are consumed by addicts annually.

Interestingly, all supplies to ultimate consumers are made against cash payment. In some major towns and cities, including Ludhiana, trade is so deeply entrenched that even home supplies are organised for addicts.

Social researchers hold that in the long run the parallel economy run by the illicit drug trade can have disastrous effects. It does not produce any real, legal goods, nor does it promote investment into industry or infrastructure needed to rehabilitate this terrorism-torn state to strengthen its economy.

Instead much of the capital is sequestered into bank accounts outside the country. A part of it is allegedly spent on keeping politicians and bureaucrats on the right side of the "kingpins" of the trade. Some of the new mansions which have come up in rural Punjab, especially in the border districts of Amritsar, Gurdaspur and Ferozepore, are illustrative of where some of the profits made from the parallel economy end up. In the long term, both the state and its people stand to lose.

Concluded