A month ago, on 28 September, Haryana created a body with an unusual job description. The SANKALP Anti-Drug Society will not arrest a trafficker, run a hospital or teach a class. Its work is to make the departments that do all three move as one. The Chief Minister chairs it. Its first meeting has approved its Memorandum and Bye-laws, and its action plan goes before it at the next.Why should this matter to a family in any of our twenty-two districts? Because drugs are never only a police matter. They reach a home through a chemist’s counter, an idle evening, a phone, a friend. They leave through treatment, a coach, a school that notices, a village that cares. No single office holds all of those doors. Until they are held together, the trade will always find the one left open.One table, one dashboardIn thirty-three years in uniform I sat in twenty-seven offices. The lesson that stayed longest came from the Enforcement Directorate, where I worked on some of the early cases under the money-laundering law: a criminal trade can survive the arrest of its men, but not the loss of its money. The second came from the State’s narcotics bureau. Prevention, enforcement and treatment are spread across a dozen departments, each doing good work, and the work multiplies only when they do it together.

Last December, at the fiftieth PRAGATI meeting, the Prime Minister asked the States to bring PRAGATI’s discipline to the social sector. PRAGATI works because one screen puts every project, its owner and its date before the person who can unblock it. SANKALP applies that idea to drugs. Haryana is among the first States to answer the call, and, as far as I know, the first to do so on drugs.Think of SANKALP as a Chief of Defence Staff for this campaign. It commands no troops of its own. It makes the police, the hospitals, the schools, the panchayats and the chemists’ regulator fight as one, on one plan, with one set of figures, under a Chief Minister who will review the work every quarter. There is no new office in any district and no new post. Each department and each district names one officer who answers for its part.The government’s order sets three priorities for the first year: fewer young people drawn into drugs, treatment capacity that is verified as working, and villages and wards certified on verified conditions. They serve the four aims of the Union Home Ministry’s vision for a drug-free India: break the networks, shut the chemical route, reduce demand, and build the strength to sustain the effort. We will not reinvent the wheel. We will take what has worked elsewhere, from Iceland’s school surveys to the United Nations’ programmes for families, and try harder than anyone to make it work here.Proof over promises

I know the question in many minds: people have seen campaigns before, so why should this one be different? My answer is that nobody should take my word for it. We will count outcomes, not events. Not the number of rallies held, but the number of young people on a ground every week, treatment beds found working, dens found closed. Every month a random sample of the reported figures will be checked on the spot by someone from outside the unit, before anything is published. Transparency will be maintained, and people’s concerns will be noted and addressed.The drug-free village shows the change best. Until now a panchayat declared its village drug-free by its own resolution. That was a valuable first step: a village giving its word. Now the word will be backed by proof. A village or ward will be certified only when four conditions hold, each checked by someone from outside: no den found on a surprise visit, every listed trafficker facing the law, families and a village committee at work with anyone who asks for help linked to treatment, and a ground in regular use. The conditions must hold for six months before the certificate is given, and it goes the month they fail.The same discipline applies to the trade. A carrier can be replaced in a day; a financier cannot. Between January and September this year, traffickers’ property worth Rs 19.52 crore was attached or frozen, more than in the whole of last year. The plan carries a financial investigation into every commercial-quantity case, a register of dens in every police station with each den closed within thirty days, and a chemical-drugs wing in the Anti-Narco Task Force. Every chemist will face a decoy purchase. A tablet that leaves a factory legally should never reach a teenager.

And every suspected drug-related death will be recorded the same way everywhere, under a joint protocol of the Health Department and the Police, and traced back to its supplier. Counts will be published by district, never names. Behind every number is a family.The evening is the battlegroundA young person on a floodlit ground, with a coach who knows his name, is the hardest customer a trafficker will ever have. So every government ground, park and hall will be matched with a coach, a physical training instructor or an employee recruited on the sports quota, and kept open in the evenings and on Sundays. The leagues are designed to lead on to selection, scholarships and careers. We do not need new stadiums. We need the ones we have to stay open after five.You build the engine before you announce the journey, and this first month has gone into the engine. The journey belongs to everyone. If you know where drugs are sold, tell your police station or your Deputy Commissioner; you will not be named. If your son or daughter needs help, ask for it without shame, because addiction is a disease, not a disgrace. A drug-free Haryana will not be built in an office in Panchkula. It will be built in every home, every school and every village that decides this fightis its own. / DAILY WORLD /

(DAILY WORLD )