District-level data on substance use can help design better interventions, officials say.
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The Union government has started planning a fresh round of a nationwide survey to establish the extent and pattern of substance use, officials told The Hindu. This will expand on the ‘National Survey on Extent and Pattern of Substance Use in India 2017-18’, which was a first-of-its-kind study on estimating illicit drug use in the country.
The Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment is currently in the process of finalising the formalities for it and the design for the survey is being readied, the official added.
They said that the fresh round of the survey is likely to have a sample size that is “three to four times” that of the one conducted in 2017-18 and that this round will try to gather patterns of substance use at the district-level.
The 2017-18 survey on substance use had two components which were put together for the entire exercise. The first entailed a household survey, under which over 4.7 lakh people in about 2 lakh households across the country were sampled. This was followed by a respondent-driven survey (RDS), which specifically surveyed over 72,000 people with drug dependence, to account for the possible under-reporting of illicit drug use in the household survey.
Atul Ambekar of the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, which led the exercise, explained that this method involved picking 20 people with drug dependence in each district. Each of the respondents is then asked to refer three other drug-dependent persons and the chain is continued till a satisfying sample size is achieved.
The 2017-18 survey, which was the first time under-reporting was accounted for with the RDS method, had concluded that alcohol was the most used substance, with over 15 crore people estimated to be using it, of which around 30 lakh were estimated to be minors (between 10-17 years of age). This was followed by cannabis, opioids, sedatives, inhalants, cocaine, amphetamine type stimulants, and hallucinogens respectively, according to data from the survey presented in Parliament by the government.
It is “critical” to have data on substance use that goes beyond State-level to the districts so that interventions can be designed accordingly, an official said.
The official added that from the health perspective, the fresh round will also be important to provide an understanding of how patterns of use are changing. Key meetings with stakeholders and representatives of State governments are likely to be scheduled in the coming months, the source added.
While the previous survey had clubbed multiple similar substances under the same heading – such as cannabis (including ganja, bhang, and charas) or opioids (including heroin, poppy, and pharmaceuticals – experts have opined that it would also be important to see “granular” data about which pharmaceuticals are being used and abused.
Before the 2017-18 national survey, the last time a study was conducted on substance use was in 2004. But the methodology of this survey had become problematic as it had surveyed only men, its sampling had allowed for only national-level assessments, and it had relied only on household survey data.
A comparison of data from the 2004 and 2017-18 surveys tabled in Parliament by the Social Justice Ministry showed that in the time between the two surveys the prevalence of use of alcohol and cannabis had gone down, but that prevalence of use of opiates and opioids had increased from 0.7% to 2.1% in the population.
Published – May 22, 2025 10:40 pm IST