3.96 Lakh NDPS Cases Pending: Why India's Toughest Drug Law Still Runs Without Its Special Courts

THE BARGAIN AT THE HEART OF THE NDPS ACT

• AND WHY IT ISN'T BEING KEPT Section 37 of the NDPS Act makes bail almost impossible for serious drug offences - the accused must satisfy the court there are reasonable grounds to believe they are innocent, a reverse-onus standard few other Indian criminal statutes carry. The text says this harshness was never meant to stand alone. Section 36 lets the government constitute exclusive Special Courts, headed by a Sessions Judge, precisely so a bail-starved undertrial isn't also stuck behind a multi-year queue of unrelated criminal matters. In practice, that second half of the bargain has barely been built. Against 3.96 lakh pending NDPS cases, only 65 exclusive Special Courts are functioning nationwide - and Punjab, carrying 60,000 of those cases, has not constituted a single one.

Section 36A's Silent Promise Section 36A goes further:

any NDPS offence punishable with more than three years' imprisonment must be tried only by a Special Court, not a regular one. Where no such court exists, the case still has to go somewhere - so it funnels into an ordinary sessions court already handling murder, robbery and everything else.

This is exactly the outcome Section 36 was written to prevent. The statute assumes an institutional partner that, in 22 states, simply does not exist yet.

Where the Gap Actually Bites

Kerala illustrates the scale of the mismatch: 50,000 pending cases, but only 2 of a proposed 9 courts are running. An undertrial denied bail under Section 37's strict test has no fast-tracked forum to test the charge against them - the case waits in the same backlog as everything else.

What the law frames as strict-but-speedy justice becomes, on the ground, strict-and-indefinite detention. This is not a hypothetical due-process worry; the Home Ministry's own meeting recorded the Supreme Court's concern over exactly this pattern of delay.

The Real Reform Being Attempted

The current push - NCORD coordination, state-wise court proposals, pre-trial conferences modelled on time-bound Supreme Court proceedings - is less about writing new law and more about finally building the machinery the existing law already presumes.

That distinction matters for how the reform should be judged: this isn't a legislative gap, it's an implementation gap and implementation gaps don't close through fresh statutes but through state-level judicial infrastructure spending and High Court cooperation.

For the exam, the sharper reading isn't "India needs tougher drug laws"

• it already has one of the toughest bail regimes in the penal code. The reading is that a statute's severity is only as legitimate as the speedy-trial infrastructure that was supposed to justify it and right now, in most of India, that infrastructure is still a proposal on paper.