Quo Vadis, Rehab Centres?

The substance use crisis gripping Assam is not breaking news. For years, heroin, synthetic drugs, pharmaceutical misuse, and injecting drug use have ravaged communities across the state, touching families in ways that rarely make headlines until the consequences become impossible to ignore. What has fundamentally changed and what now demands the most urgent public attention is the ecosystem that has mushroomed in response to this crisis: a sprawling, poorly regulated network of private and NGO-operated rehabilitation centres that, in far too many cases, has become a site of harm rather than healing.

Between June 1 and June 21, 2026, a span of barely three weeks, a disturbing cascade of incidents unfolded across multiple districts of Assam. On June 1, the Wish Welfare Foundation in Nagaon came under public scrutiny following allegations of the physical assault of an inmate, with family members demanding an immediate investigation. Five days later, multiple rehabilitation centres across Biswanath faced widespread allegations of abuse and mistreatment, prompting urgent administrative inspections. By June 11, the Nagaon district administration had sealed the Wish Welfare Foundation after inspectors discovered Standard Operating Procedure violations and evidence of inhumane treatment, resulting in the arrest of three individuals. That same day, a woman filed a formal complaint against the Nagaon Pohar Foundation in Khutikatiya, and separately, the family of an inmate at Prayukti Rehabilitation Centre in Kahilipara, Guwahati, lodged a police complaint alleging physical assault and the unlawful denial of family visits. Then, between June 20 and 21, came the most chilling report of all: news of an inmate’s death at the Naholia De-Addiction Cum Rehabilitation Centre in Duliajan, with the victim’s family displaying visible injury marks to the media and alleging physical assault.

These are not isolated aberrations. They are the visible surface of a deep, deliberate, and systemic institutional rot.

As a former officer of the Indian Police Service who has spent decades tracking the narcotics crisis across the Northeast, I am not easily shocked. Yet the pattern emerging from these incidents, deaths under suspicious circumstances, routine beatings administered as discipline, families denied access to their loved ones, and facilities operating in flagrant defiance of the SOPs the state itself introduced in 2024, speaks to a regulatory failure of grave proportions. Each such incident is not merely a local administrative lapse; it is a violation of Article 21 of the Constitution of India, which guarantees every citizen the inviolable right to life and dignity, and a direct breach of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which mandates humane treatment for all persons receiving care for substance use disorders.

The accountability gap is dangerously wide on multiple fronts. Regulatory agencies detect abuse only after fatal outcomes, after videos go viral on social media, after inmates escape, or after public outrage forces administrative hands. The Assam Drug Rehabilitation Centres Association, which ought to function as a meaningful self-regulatory body, has no formally binding code of conduct, no independent complaint review mechanism, and no demonstrated capacity to discipline member centres. Meanwhile, patients who are already socially isolated, economically vulnerable, and physically dependent are the people least equipped to report abuse, and they currently have no reliable, state-managed channel through which to seek redress.

What is needed now is not another well-intentioned government circular. What is needed is decisive, multi-layered action without further delay. The first and most urgent step is a comprehensive, district-by-district inspection of every operating facility across the state, verifying each centre for valid licensing, legal registration, and full compliance with the Assam SOP of 2024. Facilities that fail basic safety thresholds must be sealed immediately. Simultaneously, every institutional death recorded in these facilities must be subjected to an independent, third-party investigation, one that rigorously examines post-mortem findings, reviews CCTV footage, and determines criminal liability wherever evidence warrants it. The state must also establish a publicly accessible online registry of all approved and accredited de-addiction facilities, so that families desperately seeking help are not inadvertently consigning their loved ones to unregistered and abusive setups.

Patient protection must become the non-negotiable locus for every regulatory intervention. A centralised, round-the-clock, toll-free grievance helpline and an anonymous digital complaint portal, managed directly by the state government and bypassing facility operators, would give inmates and their families a safe channel to report abuse without fear of retaliation. Independent Patient Welfare Committees, comprising human rights advocates, qualified medical professionals, and civil society representatives, must be empowered to conduct unannounced bi-monthly visits to all registered centres. For women’s facilities in particular, strict, mandatory protocols must ensure they are staffed exclusively by female professionals and subject to close, regular governmental oversight.

Clinical and infrastructure standards, meanwhile, cannot remain aspirational. Facilities operating without a qualified psychiatrist, licensed counsellors, trained nursing staff, and functioning emergency medical transfer protocols must face immediate and meaningful penalties. Continuous CCTV coverage of all common areas, dining halls, and corridors, with cloud-based backups accessible to state monitoring authorities, must be made mandatory for every registered centre. These are not extravagant demands; they are the bare minimum threshold of a humane care environment.

Finally, self-regulatory bodies like the ADRCA must be restructured to adopt legally binding and transparent codes of conduct. Associations that fail to flag or discipline abusive member centres must themselves face direct regulatory consequences. And across the entire rehabilitation sector, through mandatory human rights training and enforceable zero-tolerance policies for physical coercion, the fundamental orientation of care must shift, once and for all, from punitive confinement to genuine therapeutic support.

The individuals housed in these centres came seeking recovery. They arrived in their most vulnerable and desperate moments, trusting that licensed institutions would protect them. That trust has been catastrophically and repeatedly betrayed. The deaths, the beatings, the silenced complaints, and the sealed centres of June 2026 are not statistics to be filed away. They are a moral indictment of a system that has permitted the language of rehabilitation to mask practices belonging to an entirely darker vocabulary.

Assam can do better. It must!

(The author is a former Director General of Assam Police, as well as an author and filmmaker. This piece has been published to mark the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.)