PRIYANKA Walia, a journalist friend from Ludhiana in Punjab, was fuming when I met her earlier this week at Monkey Bar, a popular hangout near my office in New Delhi. “I should not have wasted five hundred rupees on Udta Punjab. There is nothing new in the story. I still can’t understand why the censor board created such a fuss,” she said angrily.

After much controversy, thanks to the Central Board of Film Certification’s nitpicking, Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab opened to audiences on June 17. According to a review that appeared in Hindustan Times, the film does not glorify drugs but shows the ruinous situation in Punjab — as CBFC claims. “What may look like an indigenous version of the popular American series Breaking Bad, it circles around a group of people who operate on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. They are the ones ensuring a constant drug supply in the wheat bowl of India. Protected by the high and mighty in politics, it’s hard to pinpoint anyone. At its current scale, the onus is on nobody to contain the menace,” the review said.

What the censor board was trying to keep under wraps has been out in the open for long. “Everyone knows about this problem in Punjab. The issue has become politically sensitive now because the elections are next year. Earlier, it was restricted to the rural areas but now even middle-class families have young men and women doing drugs,” Priyanka told me that evening. “My aunt’s son got into [drugs] in school and was sent to a rehab centre in Delhi. But she told us that they have sent him to Canada for a vacation.”

The situation in the state is severe. A report, published by the premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences, on the Punjab drug problem estimates that there are 230,000 opioid — heroin, opium, doda, phukki — dependent people, and four times as many opioid users. It also estimates the annual expenditure on opioid drugs in the state to be about seventy-five billion rupees. The government junked the report.

In 2009, Punjab’s Department of Health and Family Welfare commissioned a study on drug abuse in Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Gurdaspur and Ferozepur. It found that majority of drug abusers were between the ages of 16 to 35. Then, a crackdown on street drug peddling led to 9,305 FIRs being registered from April to November 2013. Over 319,000 injections and 31 million pharmaceutical drugs (prone to misuse) were recovered. Punjab’s jails house 28,000 inmates for drug-related cases, against a capacity of 18,000.

The easy availability of drugs has certainly played a big role in drug addiction in Punjab. But the point being missed in the debate on Udta Punjab is that the drug menace in the state is a symptom of a deeper malaise, which has afflicted rural parts of the state for several decades now; the cumulative impact of that malaise is visible now, with alcohol and drug abuse becoming pronounced.

“Over the past few decades, worsening agrarian distress coupled with growing unemployment has led to frustration among the rural youth. The fragmentation of land holdings and the breakdown of joint family structures — which acted as a social cushion — have contributed to the decline in farm incomes, turning agriculture into a loss-making proposition,” India’s foremost food policy analyst, Devinder Sharma, told me recently.

Other problems include limited employment opportunities for the youth, illegal migration and alcoholism. Punjabi singers also glorify alcohol and drug use and speak of them as easy means to overcome frustration. Rural distress is leading to drug abuse and also to farmers’ suicides. Seventy two farmers committed suicides between April 1 and May 13, 2016. In 2015, 449 farmers committed suicide. Udta Punjab has made the ruling Akali Dal-BJP alliance uncomfortable and has given AAP and the Congress an election issue.

Even before the 2014 general elections, the drug story was out in the open — the government just chose to look the other way.

Calling Udta Punjab a “seminal” film on Punjab’s drug issue, my senior colleague in Hindustan Times, Vinod Sharma, recently told me what he saw when visiting Punjab prior the 2014 elections.

“Small packs were being distributed on the sidelines of a public meeting, addressed by a minister in the state government. On the fringes of the small stampede for drug packets were two young girls — tall, fair and pretty, like many women in the Punjab countryside are. But their sunken eyes bore a tale of addiction-based exploitation. A trifle hesitant to lunge forward to grab their share, they waited in anticipation, staring at their mobile phones they couldn’t hold steadily. The disturbing image hasn’t left me since.”

The writer is associate editor with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi.

Twitter: @kumkumdasgupta

Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2016