A drug haul worth ₹1 crore — and a clever Bollywood punchline to go with it. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, took to X to commend the Sribhumi Police after they seized 10,000 Yaba tablets worth ₹1 crore and apprehended one accused, even as three police personnel were injured in the operation.

The Sribhumi bust: 10,000 tablets and one in custody

The operation, carried out by @sribhumipolice — the district police of Sribhumi (Cachar district region) in Assam — resulted in the seizure of 10,000 Yaba tablets, a methamphetamine-caffeine compound that has become the narcotic of choice smuggled across India's porous northeastern border with Myanmar. One accused has been apprehended. Critically, three police personnel sustained injuries during the operation, drawing a personal wish for recovery from the Chief Minister himself.

Sarma framed the seizure with a wry reference to the iconic Indian quiz show: '₹1 crore ka sawaal tha. Police ne 'lock kiya jaaye' ko seriously le liya' — roughly, 'It was a ₹1-crore question. The police took 'lock it in' literally.' The line landed as both a pat on the back and a sharp signal: Assam's anti-drug machinery is watching, and it is moving.

Yaba: Assam's northeastern drug crisis in a tablet

Yaba — the Thai word for 'crazy medicine' — is a tablet combining methamphetamine and caffeine, manufactured largely across the border in Myanmar's Shan State and trafficked through the hills of Manipur and Mizoram before flooding Assam's markets. The drug's small size, low cost, and high addictive potential make it a particular challenge for law enforcement. Seizures running into lakhs of tablets have become a grim metric of the scale of the problem across the Northeast.

Chief Minister Sarma has made the anti-drug campaign a defining political and administrative plank of his tenure, anchoring it under the twin hashtags #AssamAgainstDrugs and #NashaMuktBharat — the latter aligning Assam's state-level push with the Centre's national drug-free India mission. Regular public callouts of police successes on social media are a deliberate strategy: they build pressure on the force, signal political will, and put traffickers on notice simultaneously.

Three injured officers and a Chief Minister's acknowledgement

The human cost of the bust was not glossed over. Sarma explicitly wished the three injured police personnel a speedy recovery — a detail that underscores how these operations, even against drug couriers, carry real physical risk. It also elevates the tone from a routine press release to a moment of institutional solidarity: the Chief Minister is watching not just the numbers, but the people behind them.

As Assam tightens the net on Yaba trafficking corridors, Tuesday's seizure is a reminder that the ₹1-crore question on the Northeast's drug crisis does not have a single, final answer — but the police are locking in every answer they can find.