InDepth | Drugs and the Golden Triangle: Renewed Concerns for Northeast India

For years, India’s Northeast was described as a corridor: a narrow geographical passage through which drugs produced in Myanmar’s Golden Triangle entered India. This description is inadequate. Today, the region is simultaneously a border, a market, a staging ground and, in parts of Manipur, a site of cultivation and processing. Across the 1,643-km India-Myanmar frontier, heroin and methamphetamine continue to enter India, while the trafficking networks moving them are becoming more dispersed, technology-enabled and difficult to track. The routes, too, are changing: when one becomes harder to use, another opens.

The Narcotics Control Bureau’s (NCB’s) 2025 report calls the escalation of the Myanmar-linked threat “dramatic”. It says that Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland face the sharpest frontline exposure. A March 2026 Lok Sabha reply, compiling seizures reported by all drug-law-enforcement agencies, shows that Manipur’s seizures rose from just 284 kg in 2024 to 2,556 kg in 2025. Mizoram’s seizures increased from 1,967 kg to 2,233 kg over the same period. Assam reported 31,706 kg in 2025, while Tripura reported 46,346 kg. However, seizure volumes are not a direct measure of how much narcotics enter a state. They are influenced by enforcement activity, intelligence and the type of drugs that are intercepted. But taken together, with evidence of expanding production across the border, it points to a drug market that is becoming harder to contain.

Supply From Myanmar

Myanmar’s illicit opium economy has expanded sharply since 2020. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated 45,200 hectares under poppy cultivation in 2024, up from 29,510 hectares in 2020. In 2025, cultivation increased another 17 per cent, to 53,100 hectares, the highest level in a decade. The Shan state division accounted for around 88 per cent of Myanmar’s cultivation. Myanmar is now the world’s largest opium producer, according to the UNODC’s World Drug Report 2026. “A significant source of Shan region’s illicit drug manufacturing feeds trafficking into India,” says NCB’s director general Anurag Garg.

The NCB sees this expansion against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s collapse as an opium producer following the ban by the Taliban. Its 2025 assessment describes Myanmar as an increasingly important substitute source for the global opiate market and warns that the contraction in Afghan production should not be mistaken for a diminishing threat to India. The India-Myanmar border runs through Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. Its terrain—forests, hills and numerous informal crossing points—makes surveillance difficult. And the drugs do not remain in the Northeast. The NCB has identified a major trafficking corridor through Champhai in Mizoram, from where consignments move towards Silchar in Assam’s Barak Valley, through Aizawl and adjoining roads, and towards Meghalaya and Guwahati before it is distributed further into mainland India. That makes the Northeast the point from where the international drug economy connects with India’s domestic distribution network. This vulnerability is not new. Bhushan Lal Vohra, a retired IPS officer who has served in the Northeast and Punjab, points to the geography as one of the enduring weaknesses in India’s drug-control architecture. He says the India-Myanmar border has historically been inadequately policed. But Vohra believes that geography alone does not explain the growth of the trade. The real challenge, he says, is the money behind it.

“Drug lords have much more money than any state government in the Northeast,” says Vohra. That imbalance, he argues, makes the drug war fundamentally different from an ordinary poli­cing exercise. India can intercept consignments and arrest couriers, but the networks have the money to replace both people and routes.

The New Challenge

Northeast’s older drug story was dominated by heroin and opium. The newer ones increasingly involve synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamine. In 2024, Indian enforcement agencies seized 8.2 tonnes of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), most of which are believed to be methamphetamine. The UNODC puts the increase at 500 per cent as compared to 2020. The NCB’s assessment similarly identifies the sharp rise in ATS seizures as one of the clearest indicators of the changing threat.

This distinction matters. Poppy cultivation requires land. Synthetic drugs can be produced in clandestine laboratories and moved in compact, high-value consignments. Their production and trafficking can therefore be more mobile and less dependent on geography. The Northeast is consequently confronting two drug economies at once: the old trade in opiates and a rapidly expanding synthetic drug market.

According to Maibam Jogesh, a substance-abuse survivor and president of the Users Society for Effective Response (USER), Manipur had historically been a transit route for drugs originating in the Golden Triangle, but now poppy cultivation has taken roots and so have opioid derivatives such as heroin and brown sugar. Clandestine manufacturing units have also emerged. His concern is not theoretical. Jogesh says USER’s field workers had encountered poppy cultivation in Manipur’s hills as early as in 2006. He also described the emergence of a locally produced, cruder form of brown sugar known as ‘Thum Morok’, which, he says, has begun to replace the ‘Number 4’ heroin, traditionally produced in Myanmar. He linked the availability of cheaper local drugs to the growth in users.

The continuing conflict in Manipur has added another layer to the problem. Garg says that the conflict did not necessarily increase trafficking. Instead, it made traditional trafficking routes through Manipur less secure, pushing traffickers towards Mizoram, where movement has became comparatively easier.

The NCB’s assessment suggests that changes in the security environment have forced traffickers to redirect routes. Mizoram has consequently become increasingly important. Champhai, bordering Myanmar’s Chin State, is now a significant point in the westward movement of synthetic drugs. The UNODC has identified Mizoram as an important entry point for methamphetamine from Myanmar. The route can then run through Aizawl and Silchar before moving into Assam and beyond. In 2023, Assam Rifles and the customs department in Mizoram seized 39.04 lakh tablets containing triprolidine and pseudoephedrine, chemicals that can be used as precursors in methamphetamine production in Champhai district. The seizure highlighted not just the movement of finished drugs, but the trafficking of precursors in the opposite direction.

India has responded with more seizures, eradication drives, border surveillance and coordination between central and state agencies. In June 2026, India and Myanmar held their eighth bilateral meeting on drug-control cooperation, discussing intelligence-sharing, coordinated operations, precursor-chemical control, synthetic drugs, darknet-enabled trafficking and illicit opium cultivation.

But enforcement inside India cannot address the production in Myanmar, where opium cultivation rose to 53,100 hectares in 2025, even as its civil conflict continues.

Vohra says that the response needs to extend beyond the fields and the border checkpoints. It means following the money behind cultivation; investigating financiers rather than only the couriers; tracking precursor chemicals; strengthening cyber and forensic capabilities; and sharing intelligence across states and across borders.

Mrinalini Dhyani is a senior correspondent at Outlook