Crackdown on Punjab's Drug Dens

Amritsar: Just 25 km away from the Amritsar, Haweliyan village wears a desolate look. On entering the village, one finds most lanes empty.

The few people who are outside their houses seem hesitant to talk to outsiders. But when NDTV chanced upon a group of women sitting outside a house, reasons for their initial hesitation becomes clear.

Darshan Kaur tells NDTV that her 26-year-old son is among the 40 men who have been arrested in the last one month from Punjab's border villages for allegedly smuggling drugs. Since then, whenever the villagers see an unknown vehicle enter the village, they fear the worst.

"Police said my son was named by someone, claiming he worked with that guy. My son (Jarnail Singh) was just a tailor at a showroom. He was working there for the past one year. Cops were enquiring about him. They arrested him from the showroom itself," said the 61-year-old mother.

She has three other boys, all of whom have left the village fearing arrest.

But Haweliyan and Nishera Dhalla, with a population of around 4000 people, are just two of the villages close to the border which have been flagged off as drug dens by the Punjab police, who have launched a massive crackdown on drugs since the end of May.

Despite the presence of border security forces that man these areas, packets of drugs are smuggled in surreptitiously and picked up at night on the other side.

At times even children are used as couriers to pick up these packets of drugs from the fields near the border.

Sources from the local police say, "There is some checking of older boys or men, but usually no one checks kids. Though we have never seen these children, but we have heard even from the accused that children are being used as they escape suspicion". These drugs are then sent off as consignments to neighbouring states of Rajasthan and Delhi.

The police claims, these villages are mainly being used as a route by cross border criminal elements to dispatch drugs to other areas, sometimes even outside India, adding that over the past one month they have seized more than 4 kgs of heroin, worth Rs 4 crore from these villages.

But it is not just smuggling. A large number of young men in these villages have also fallen prey to these drugs. A few boys tell NDTV that these men have been sent for rehab, and that though not many in the village use drugs any more, the menace is not completely over.

"The number of packets coming in has gone down, but they still come in. But mostly the men who were doing drugs are all in jail now since there is a new government at the Centre, and there is suddenly some fear," said one of the boys who did not want to be named.

Another one said, "There have also been two or three deaths because of those doing heroin...they would do drugs at the cemetery. It was  pretty bad. You would find addicts at each and every lane."

Now those lanes are mostly empty, except for a few women waiting  for their sons to return.