Wednesday 27 / May / 2026
New Delhi: India's Home Minsiter Amit Shah in a blunt message to diplomats from more than 40 countries: fragmented laws are the drug cartel's best weapon — and the world is running out of time to fix it.
India's Union Home Minister Amit Shah used one of the country's most significant intelligence forums on Friday to issue a direct call to the international community: harmonise drug laws, standardise penalties, share intelligence in real time, and extradite kingpins — or watch narco-states become the world's next power centres.
Speaking at the R.N. Kao Memorial Lecture 2026, the annual lecture series in honour of its founder Rameshwar Nath Kao, Shah addressed an audience that included ambassadors, high commissioners and diplomats from more than 40 countries, members of Kao's family, and officials from India's security establishment. The forum was used this year not for a retrospective on intelligence craft, but for a forward-looking call to global action on narcotics.
"The world, with a population of 8 billion people, 195 nations, and 250,000 kilometres of international borders, cannot tackle the problem of drugs through fragmented approaches," Shah said.
The domestic foundation
Shah said that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has set a goal to achieve a Drug-Free India by 2047, and that Indian security agencies had prepared a roadmap to eradicate drug syndicates. The zero-tolerance policy, he stated, meant India would ensure not one gram of narcotics enters the country or uses Indian territory as a transit route. Android Authority
Between 2014 and 2025, drugs weighing over one crore eleven lakh kilograms and valued at one lakh seventy-one thousand crore rupees were seized. Shah cited India's record of bringing back more than 40 transnational criminals in the last two years with the support of friendly nations — while acknowledging that much more remained to be done.
The domestic architecture is already in place. A nationwide anti-drug campaign launched from March 31 this year runs for three years, with all central government departments required to prepare roadmaps up to 2029 with time-bound review mechanisms. The Drug-Free India campaign is currently running across 372 districts, with ten crore people and three lakh educational institutions associated with it.
