Western Coastline Emerges as Key Route for Illegal Arms Flow into India: Report

Western coastline becomes key corridor for illegal arms flow into India: Report

By Rajnish Singh, New Delhi, July 6

The report, collated based on inputs from security agencies, mentions that the South Asian arms trafficking network reaches India through both land and sea.

It explains that while one branch enters via the land border in Punjab and Rajasthan, another increasingly exploits the maritime frontier along the Gujarat and Maharashtra coastlines.

Officials said traffickers rely on fishing vessels and small coastal craft that can evade conventional maritime surveillance systems because they often operate below standard detection thresholds.

Security agencies say traffickers frequently adapt their routes and methods to avoid enforcement, using legitimate fishing activity and coastal movement to conceal illicit consignments. The maritime route has therefore become an area of heightened vigilance amid efforts to strengthen coastal security and disrupt transnational arms smuggling networks.

"The South Asian arm flows through Pakistan into India via both the land frontier in Punjab and Rajasthan, and the maritime frontier along the Gujarat and Maharashtra coastlines, the latter a route of increasing concern given its use of fishing vessels and coastal craft that operate below the detection threshold of standard maritime surveillance," mentions the Narcotics Control Bureau's (NCB's) Annual Report 2025.

The report further pointed out that India has emerged as a critical transit and destination point for global arms and drug trafficking networks, with smugglers constantly adapting routes in response to law enforcement action and geopolitical developments.

It also noted that drug trafficking routes are neither static nor predictable, and they respond to enforcement pressure with geographic displacement, adapt to geopolitical events through rerouting, and exploit legitimate trade infrastructure.

Positioned between the world's major narcotics-producing regions, the report further states that "India sits at the intersection of every major trafficking pathway."

It also says that the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran corridor remains the world's primary opiate trafficking complex. Pre- ban stockpiles of about 13,200 tonnes are currently sustaining these trafficking pipelines.

The report later mentioned that the Golden Crescent corridor is a major illicit opium-producing region spanning the mountainous peripheries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, bifurcating beyond Pakistan.

The Balkan Route (primary overland corridor used by migrants and refugees travelling from the Middle East and Asia into the European Union), the Central agency's report signals its role in carrying out heroin through Iran, Turkey, and into Western Europe.

The historically dominant European heroin supply pathway is now increasingly carrying methamphetamine alongside heroin (route convergence).

For India, the Golden Triangle threat manifests most acutely through the North-Eastern land frontier, alerted the report, mentioning "the Manipur corridor, through which the indian National Highway 102 passes, is the primary land entry point for both heroin and methamphetamine tablets."

It later flagged Myanmar's Golden Triangle as both an opiate supplier and a dominant methamphetamine hub.

It also highlighted that the convergence of opium cultivation with large-scale methamphetamine manufacturing, primarily in areas controlled by ethnic armed groups in Shan State, has created a poly-drug production complex that is simultaneously the largest source of Golden Triangle opiates and the dominant supply hub for South-East Asian methamphetamine markets.

Notably, it says, the Bay of Bengal maritime route represents an emerging transportation channel.

The agency report later informed about the Cocaine's traditional trafficking architecture, Andean production, North American primary market, European secondary market via West African transit as undergoing significant geographic expansion.

Syria's political transition in 2024, which has disrupted the Captagon manufacturing network centred on the Syrian Arab Republic, the report mentioned, has created a trafficking uncertainty zone in the Near and Middle East that other suppliers, including emerging methamphetamine trafficking networks operating through the Gulf, are now exploiting.

"The potential geographic relocation of Captagor production to Libya or Egypt would extend synthetic drug supply into North Africa in a manner that could create new maritime trafficking routes through the Mediterranean and potentially the Red Sea," it says.

The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the report added, is another example of geopolitics leading to the rise and fall of drug production hubs and trafficking networks.

— ANI