‘Extradite foreigners to curb drug-peddling’

Manali is the drug abode of India. Himachal Pradesh government has admitted to the dubious fact and wants the central government to extradite all foreigners living there for years to make the famous tourist destination drug-free.

Updated on: Mar 26, 2012, 01:06:16 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Manali is the drug abode of India. Himachal Pradesh government has admitted to the dubious fact and wants the central government to extradite all foreigners living there for years to make the famous tourist destination drug-free.

Himachal Pradesh chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal told the planning commission on Friday that drug-peddling and usage was rampant in Manali and nearby areas, and was the main reason that attracted so many foreigners.

He was replying to a specific query by member-secretary of the planning commission Sudha Pillai that what was the state government doing to tackle the growing menace of drug-peddling and consumption in Manali. She said high consumption of drugs was having adverse impacts on the locals.

Dhumal did not shrug off the criticism and said drug-peddling was going on in the higher reaches of Manali, especially where foreigners are staying. “Many of them (foreigners) have married to local girls and have been staying there for years. They deal in drug business. But the state government does not have the powers to send them back to their countries,” he told the plan panel during a discussion on the annual plan for the state on Friday.

The chief minister has asked plan panel deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia to urge the union home ministry to start extradition proceedings against the foreigners who are believed to be running drug rackets.

Manali drugs, especially from the Malana village are popular among drug abusers. Entry of law enforcement agencies into the village has been restricted owing to the high-handedness of local drug lords. This is the apparent reason for the state government not taking any action against the drug-peddlers in Manali. As per data available with the state government, over one lakh foreign tourists visited Manali in 2010.

At the meeting, Dhumal also said the central government had laid only 45 km of railway network in Himachal Pradesh in the past 60 years. He said the Chinese railway, meanwhile, was about to reach the state’s border.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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