Examine the institutional overlap between the Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan and the Nasha Mukt Yuva for Viksit Bharat Sankalp Abhiyan. What are the implications of parallel ministry-led drug-control campaigns for policy coherence?

India's demand-reduction effort now runs on two tracks — the Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (NMBA), launched on 15 August 2020 under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE) [5], and the 100-week Nasha Mukt Yuva Sankalp Abhiyan launched by the Prime Minister in 2026 under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (MoYAS) [1]. The overlap is substantial but not inherently wasteful.

Nature of the institutional overlap

• Shared objective: both pursue demand reduction rather than NDPS-style supply control; NMBA itself sits within the NAPDDR framework [3].
• Same target group: NMBA has already sensitised over 5.20 crore youth of its 15.58 crore total outreach [2] — precisely the Sankalp Abhiyan's constituency.
• Common delivery agents: faith-based and socio-cultural bodies partner both — NMBA through MoUs, and the Sankalp Abhiyan through the Kashi Declaration (Varanasi, July 2025) backed by over 100 spiritual organisations [4].
• Divergent mandates: MoSJE owns the treatment arm — IRCAs, District De-addiction Centres, peer-led interventions [3]; MoYAS owns mass mobilisation through MY Bharat [1].

Implications for policy coherence

• Positive: a specialised youth ministry brings scale and Jan Bhagidari that a welfare ministry cannot, while treatment stays with the ministry equipped for it.
• Awareness outruns care: NMBA reports 15.58 crore sensitised but only 27.76 lakh treated [2]; without a named referral pathway from each event site to an IRCA, campaigns generate demand for help that the system cannot absorb.
• Diluted targeting: over half of India's roughly 60 lakh opioid use disorder cases are concentrated in eight states [6], yet mobilisation is spread uniformly nationwide [1].
• Attribution gap: the only national baseline is the 2019 AIIMS survey [6], leaving outcomes unmeasurable.

Duplication here is a design problem, not a reason to abandon either campaign. A joint MoSJE–MoYAS mechanism under NAPDDR, event-to-centre referral mapping, and a refreshed national survey would convert parallel effort into a single continuum of prevention, treatment and recovery — the whole-of-government approach the Kashi Declaration itself envisages.