MANTRAYA ANALYSIS #89: 11 JUNE 2025
BIBHU PRASAD ROUTRAY
Abstract
Drug smuggling into India from African countries is growing. Investigations reveal a transnational cartel recruiting African youths under the guise of student and business visas to distribute drugs in Indian cities and private universities, particularly in Delhi NCR and Punjab. The involvement of South African and Ugandan nationals in similar smuggling operations indicates a broader Africa-Asia nexus. Despite India’s “Zero Tolerance” policy on narcotics since 2014, and increasing arrests and seizures, narcotics use and trafficking persist, driven by dark web networks and global supply chains involving Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Latin America. The prevalence of African nationals in these operations has reinforced stereotypes and may adversely affect legitimate African students and diplomatic relations. Suggested way forward involves strengthened bilateral cooperation, particularly with African nations, improved intelligence sharing, and multilateral strategies to address the expanding narcotics trade and its associated threats to national and regional security.
Picture this.
A 43-year-old Nigerian national arrives in Bengaluru in search of work in 2023. He fails to get a regular job and starts selling clothes to make a living. His visa expires in due course, but he stays on. Someone suggests the opportunity to make extra cash by selling narcotics to college students and others while leveraging his role as a clothes seller. He starts buying small quantities of synthetic narcotic drug MDMA (methamphetamine) from another Nigerian in the city and peddling them. As times go by, the quantities increase and so does the profit. On 20 May 2025, his luck runs out. He is arrested near a school by the police with three kilograms of MDMA worth Rupees 3 crore.
This is the story of Pepe Morepeyi. Search is on to arrest the person from whom he used to buy the MDMA.
Yet, Morepeyi isn’t an isolated case. Arrests of African nationals on charges of smuggling and peddling drugs in various Indian cities have surged in recent months, bringing attention to this trend and the unique adaptation of smugglers to exploit visa loopholes.
On 31 March 2025, MDMA and cocaine worth Rupees 27.4 crore were recovered in New Delhi, and five persons were arrested. Among them were four Nigerians, one of whom is the son of a Nigerian diplomat in India, and another, the son of a member of the Nigerian Olympic Association. Police investigation has revealed that the cartel spanning Asia and Africa recruited African youths who came to India on student visas, enrolling themselves in private universities in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) and Punjab state. Enrolling in such universities is easy for people who can afford them, as hefty fees but no entrance examination are required.
The incident followed the arrest of two South African women and the recovery of 37.878 kilograms of MDMA in Karnataka on 16 March. The drug was brought from Delhi to Bangalore by the two women, who were part of the drug-smuggling network involving Indians and Nigerians. The two women were regularly flying from Delhi to Bangalore and Mumbai to deliver the drugs to peddlers before flying back to Delhi. In the past year, the two had flown 37 times to Bengaluru and 22 times to Mumbai to execute deliveries. Both were accused of using fake passports and visas. One of them was in the food cart business and came to India on a business visa in 2020 and continued to stay in Delhi. The other woman was selling readymade clothes in Delhi. She entered India in July 2016 on a medical visa.
In the second week of April, a Ugandan mechanical engineer, who has been living in India since 2019, and his Nigerian associate were arrested in New Delhi with drugs worth Rs.1 crore. Both were supplying drugs to the students in the city. Police investigation found that the drug cartel run by another Nigerian national, who is absconding, was recruiting African students, facilitating students’ visas for them, and sending them to India to sell drugs in private universities in the NCR and Punjab.
A Growing Challenge
These arrests conform to the recent trends of narcotics smuggling into India from the African continent. Owing to its proximity to two drug-producing and smuggling regions—the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan) and the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos)—India has been at the centre of several narcotics trafficking routes over the decades, and its vast boundaries have often made it difficult for the enforcement agencies to track down the abusers of psychotropic substances. The decline of opium cultivation in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan may have led to some decrease in smuggling of Afghan drugs into India. However, that vacuum has been filled by the civil war-ridden Myanmar, from where drugs enter India’s northeastern states. Moreover, drugs from Latin America pass through multiple routes, including African countries, to reach India.
India’s Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI)’s annual Smuggling in India 2024 notes that Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran have been the source of heroin into India through the Gulf and African regions in addition to the traditional routes through the India-Pakistan border and maritime routes. However, over time, drug trafficking through air routes has also become a potent method for smugglers due to the speed and increasing volume of international air traffic.
While the incidents mentioned above are drug smuggling for Indian consumers, India is also emerging as a major supplier and a rerouting hub for narcotics. Recent enforcement operations indicate that India’s involvement in the drug trade has reached alarming levels, with the country supplying drugs to destinations such as Australia and New Zealand, Arab destinations, and ironically even to Africa itself.
Although the drug seizures by law enforcement look impressive, data reveals that actually fewer recoveries are taking place in India, mostly due to the sophisticated techniques used by the smugglers. Between 2022 and 2024, a total of 2 million kilograms of narcotics were seized by various drug law enforcement agencies across the country and destroyed. However, the annual quantity has decreased from 0.86 million in 2022 to 0.45 million in 2024. The smugglers are increasingly using darknet platforms to traffic narcotics. India’s Narcotics Control Bureau (NCRB) interdicted 96 such cases between 2022 and 2024.
India’s Zero Drug Policy
In February 2025, the Anti-Narcotics Cell of Navi Mumbai Police arrested three African nationals—two men and a woman—in Ulwe for possessing 118.48 grams of cocaine and 100.84 grams of MDMA, valued at over Rupees 1 crore. Additionally, 35 African nationals were detained for verification; 11 were served ‘Leave India Notices’ for illegal stay, and others were involved in ongoing court trials.
India has been implementing a zero tolerance towards narcotics policy since 2014. The policy aims to stop the narcotics trade in India and prevent Indian territory from being used to smuggle drugs to other countries. The government assesses that money from the illicit narcotics trade has weakened the country’s economy, as well as serving to fund terrorism and left-wing extremism. Especially concerning Kashmir, which recently saw a major terror attack killing 26 people, India has frequently argued that Pakistan has pursued a policy of injecting illicit narcotics to destroy the state’s population and economy.
Zero tolerance notwithstanding – and regardless of increasing arrest numbers of smugglers/peddlers and seizures of drugs – rampant use of narcotics continues to ravage states such as Punjab and the national capital. In fact, demand for narcotics has been increasing in most urban centres of the country, and the number of people arrested for drug offences in the country has soared.
A racial angle has been interjected into this situation. Frequent arrests of Africans for involvement in narcotics smuggling and peddling reinforce the general perception and stigma they carry in India. Nigerians, in particular, are singled out as suspects in such cases. This is corroborated by the large number of Nigerians arrested every year for involvement in narcotics smuggling and peddling. In 2023, for instance, out of the 636 foreigners arrested on such charges, 144 were Nigerians (of the total 199 from Africa). Official narratives further speak of lax rules in African airports and corruption among the employees to explain why smuggled narcotics manage to go through scanners and body checks to arrive in India.
Implications are many and obvious. At the big picture level, a lack of preventive steps from concerned African countries can hamper bilateral relations with India. At the personal level, he recent trend of African students’ involvement in narcotics smuggling can hamper the career prospects of genuine students, as universities are driven to scrutinise and refuse such admissions, while law enforcement is compelled to commit resources that could better be used elsewhere.
Necessary Steps
Narcotics trafficking fuels organised crime groups, which are diversifying into other illegal economies, such as wildlife trafficking, financial fraud, and illegal resource extraction. Given the rising illicit narcotics trade globally, cocaine trafficking is at an all-time high, as per a recent session sponsored by the respected InSight Crime – it is appropriate that nations establish frameworks of cooperation. Barring Zambia, India does not have a bilateral agreement or Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with any African nation. With South Africa, there is only a Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters (MLAT) treaty signed in 2005. In this context, there is a scope for India and African nations to cooperate and work towards bilateral agreements. Real-time intelligence sharing between concerned agencies, training and sharing of best practices could be some of the parameters of such cooperation.
(Dr. Bibhu Prasad Routray is the Director of MISS. This analysis has been published as part of Mantraya’s ongoing “Organised Crime and Illicit Trafficking” project. All Mantraya publications are peer-reviewed.)
