A single intelligence tip, a courier intercepted on a highway, and 30,000 Yaba tablets worth ₹7.5 crore off the streets — Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced the seizure on Sunday, October 18, 2026, calling it another round in what he describes as a fight against evil: 'Every Day, Every Hour.'

The Amingaon intercept: what happened overnight

The Assam Special Task Force (STF) acted on credible intelligence to stop a courier moving the consignment through Amingaon, a town in Kamrup district that sits on transit routes leading into lower Assam. The courier was arrested and the full drug haul confiscated, according to Sarma's post. At a street value of ₹7.5 crore, the seizure represents one of the larger single-intercept recoveries the STF has logged in recent months.

Yaba — a compressed tablet combining methamphetamine and caffeine — has become a signature challenge for Assam law enforcement. The tablets travel west from Myanmar through porous border routes in the Northeast before fanning out to markets in lower Assam and beyond.

The STF's intelligence-led model under the Sarma government

Since Himanta Biswa Sarma took charge as Chief Minister in 2021, the STF has been repositioned as the state's primary strike arm against narcotics trafficking, running operations that are consistently publicised — a deliberate messaging strategy that pairs enforcement visibility with political accountability. The hashtags #NashaMuktBharat and #AssamAgainstDrugs in Sunday's post anchor the state's campaign to the Centre's Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyan, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment's national drug-demand reduction programme launched in 2020.

Assam's anti-narcotics push sits alongside the Sarma administration's broader law-and-order priorities — illegal immigration enforcement and legacy insurgency management — as pillars of its governance identity heading into the second half of its term.

Why Amingaon, and why Yaba

The choice of Amingaon as an intercept point is telling. The town's location on the southern bank of the Brahmaputra, at the edge of Kamrup Metropolitan district, makes it a natural staging post for contraband moving from the Northeast's border hinterland toward the densely populated districts of lower Assam. Disrupting the route at this node rather than at the border itself suggests the STF is working informant networks deep inside the supply chain.

Yaba's affordability and compact packaging have made it the drug of choice on these routes — far easier to conceal in courier loads than bulk opium or heroin, and potent enough to command premium street prices downstream. Successive large seizures point to persistent demand, and also to an enforcement apparatus that is, at minimum, keeping pace with traffickers.

The courier's arrest and the scale of Sunday's haul signal that Assam's narcotics pipeline is under active pressure — but as long as the Myanmar supply route remains open, the STF's fight will be measured in tonnage seized, not war declared over.