Amaravati, July 29: Andhra Pradesh’s narcotics enforcement has spent five years piling up seizures and arrests that outstrip most Indian states — yet those cases collapse almost as fast as they are filed. Data tabled in the Rajya Sabha on July 29, 2026, in reply to a question on cross-border narcotics trafficking shows Andhra Pradesh convicted just 314 of the 19,590 people it arrested in drug cases between 2020 and 2024 — a conviction rate of 1.6 percent, barely a twentieth of the national average of 31.4 percent, and a fraction of Kerala’s 95.1 percent, the highest conviction rate of any major state over the same five years.
Four of these five years, and roughly half of 2024, fall within the tenure of the YSR Congress Party government under then Chief Minister Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, in office from May 2019 until the TDP-led coalition under N. Chandrababu Naidu took charge in June 2024. The enforcement record examined here is therefore substantially a record of anti-narcotics policing and prosecution under that administration.
Arrests nearly quadrupled from 2020 to 2023, tracking a nationwide enforcement push, but convictions never kept pace — and 2024 posted the worst rate of the five years.
Seizures up, convictions nowhere
Andhra Pradesh seized 5,73,751 kg of narcotics over 2020-2024 — roughly four times the 1,41,747 kg seized in neighbouring Telangana over the same period. Yet Telangana, with a quarter of AP’s seizure volume and far fewer arrests (14,050), still convicted at 4.5 percent — nearly three times AP’s rate. Kerala convicted at 95.1 percent, Karnataka at 47 percent, Punjab at 32.9 percent, Maharashtra at 34.4 percent. Andhra Pradesh’s 1.6 percent trails every comparable state by a wide margin.
Kerala: The National Outlier
Kerala’s numbers stand apart from every other state in the dataset. Against 71,661 arrests over 2020-2024, it recorded 68,154 convictions — a 95.1 percent rate, and in 2023 and 2024 its conviction count actually exceeded that year’s arrests, a sign of earlier cases being resolved on a rolling basis rather than convictions collapsing under backlog. No other major state comes close: Karnataka’s 47 percent and Punjab’s 32.9 percent are the next-best figures, still less than half of Kerala’s rate. The state’s dedicated NDPS special courts and tracked prosecution systems are widely cited as the reason, making it the natural benchmark against which Andhra Pradesh’s 1.6 percent should be read.
What the reply doesn’t explain
The minister’s written answer focuses on Indo-Myanmar border trafficking, the NCORD coordination framework, and the new Vision Document on Narcotics Control (2026-2029). The state-wise arrest and conviction figures appear only as a statistical annexure, with no explanation for why conviction rates vary so sharply between states.
The gap points to specific, checkable failure points: delayed or flawed chargesheets and forensic reports required under the NDPS Act; trial backlogs (though AP’s flat rate across five years argues against backlog alone); and gaps between arrest volume and prosecutable case quality.
The Bottom Line
Andhra Pradesh arrested more people and seized more drugs than most states between 2020 and 2024, largely under the Jaganmohan Reddy government. But almost none of that enforcement activity survived contact with the courts. A reply meant to answer a question about the North-East has surfaced an unaddressed story about Andhra Pradesh’s own narcotics prosecution pipeline.
