Five hundred days into a campaign that has reshaped how Punjab fights its most stubborn crisis, Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann stood before village volunteers in Ludhiana on Monday, August 3, 2026, and made a declaration with no exit clause: the war against drugs does not end until the last trace is gone. The Chief Minister's Office of Punjab announced that CM Mann met with Village Defence Committee (VDC) volunteers — known as Pinda De Pehredaar (guardians of the village) — to mark a significant milestone in the state's flagship anti-drug drive, 'Yudh Nashian Virudh' (war against drugs). The numbers he cited are striking: 70,000 drug smugglers arrested and 1.25 lakh volunteers mobilised across 13,000 villages since the campaign began.

How 1.25 Lakh Villagers Became Punjab's Anti-Drug Backbone

The architecture of 'Yudh Nashian Virudh' is deliberately two-layered. Police enforcement drives arrests and interdiction; the VDC volunteer network — Pinda De Pehredaar — acts as the state's eyes and ears at the ground level, covering villages that law enforcement alone cannot saturate. With 1.25 lakh volunteers spread across 13,000 villages, the campaign has effectively embedded a community watch function into rural Punjab's social fabric. CM Mann credited this citizen participation as the decisive factor behind the campaign's scale, calling it the 'backbone of the movement.' It is a model that supplements rather than replaces formal policing — an approach Punjab's successive governments have experimented with, but rarely at this reported volume.

A Crisis Punjab Has Fought Across Governments

Punjab's drug problem is not new, and neither is the political pressure to solve it. The state's proximity to the Golden Crescent trafficking route has made it a transit and consumption zone for decades, with rural communities bearing a disproportionate share of the damage. When the Aam Aadmi Party swept to power in March 2022, drug eradication was among its loudest campaign promises — a direct response to what voters in Punjab's villages had flagged as a generational emergency. 'Yudh Nashian Virudh' is the administrative expression of that promise, combining large-scale arrests with the kind of village-level mobilisation that gives a campaign political visibility and community ownership simultaneously.

What the 500-Day Mark Signals for Punjab's Villages

The choice of Ludhiana — Punjab's industrial heartland and a city that sits at the intersection of urban commerce and rural hinterland — as the venue for this milestone meeting is not incidental. It signals that the campaign's ambition reaches beyond remote villages into the state's economic core. With the 500-day mark now passed, the immediate question is whether the momentum translates into structural change: further budgetary backing, legislative reinforcement, and whether the volunteer network can be sustained beyond the campaign's current energy. CM Mann left no ambiguity on intent — the drive continues 'until every ounce of the menace is eliminated.' For Punjab's villages, the Pehredaar are no longer just a government programme. They are a community identity — and that may prove harder to dismantle than any trafficking network.