Explained snippets: How Punjab wants to address high narcotics crime rate

The Indian Express
July 04, 2018
Express News Service

On Monday, the Punjab Cabinet decided to recommend the death penalty for drug traffickers. Section 31A of the NDPS Act, in fact, already provides for the death penalty to second-time offenders in certain cases. If the first conviction is under Sections 19, 24, and 27A, which deal with various offences relating to drug trafficking, then Section 31A provides for the death penalty if the offender is subsequently convicted of production, manufacture, possession, transport or transshipment of specified drugs, or financing any of these activities.
In Punjab itself, a special Narcotics Control Bureau court had awarded the death penalty to Amritsar resident Paramjeet Singh in 2012, for a “subsequent offence” of drug trafficking, before the Punjab & Haryana High Court commuted the sentence to 15 years imprisonment the following year. After the latest Cabinet decision, the Punjab government has clarified that it has demanded the death penalty on the first conviction itself.
Among all states and Union Territories, Punjab has the highest incidence rate for cases under the NDPS Act. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) records, Punjab registered 5,906 such cases in 2016, which translates into an incidence rate of 20.2 per lakh population. In absolute numbers, Punjab’s count is the fourth highest among the states and UTs, and accounts for nearly 12% (a fraction behind Kerala, also 12%) of all NDPS cases in India. According to countrywide NCRB data for 2016, 22,086 police cases under the NDPS Act remained pending out of a total of 73,561, a pendency rate of 30%. In courts, the pendency rate nationwide was 81% — 1.62 lakh cases out of 1.99 lakh.

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