India's western coastline along Gujarat and Maharashtra has emerged as a major corridor for the smuggling of illegal arms from Pakistan, with traffickers increasingly using fishing vessels and small coastal craft to evade maritime surveillance, according to an official assessment submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
The assessment, based on inputs from multiple security agencies and detailed in the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) Annual Report 2025, said the South Asian arms trafficking network reaches India through both land and sea routes.
While one route runs across the land borders in Punjab and Rajasthan, another has increasingly shifted to the maritime frontier along the Gujarat and Maharashtra coasts, which security agencies have identified as an area of growing concern.
The report said traffickers exploit fishing boats and other small coastal vessels that often operate below the detection threshold of conventional maritime surveillance systems, allowing illicit consignments to be concealed among legitimate fishing activity.
According to the report, traffickers frequently alter their routes and methods in response to law enforcement action, making maritime surveillance and coastal security increasingly important in disrupting transnational arms smuggling networks.
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The NCB report also said India has become both a transit point and destination for global arms and narcotics trafficking because of its strategic location between some of the world's largest drug-producing regions.
It noted that trafficking routes are constantly evolving, adapting to enforcement pressure, geopolitical developments and changes in trade patterns.
The report identified the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran corridor, or the Golden Crescent, as the world's principal opiate trafficking complex, with existing stockpiles continuing to sustain illicit supply chains.
For India, however, the most immediate narcotics threat originates from the Golden Triangle, particularly through the Manipur corridor along National Highway 102, which it described as the primary land entry point for heroin and methamphetamine tablets from Myanmar.
The report also flagged the Bay of Bengal as an emerging maritime route for drug trafficking and warned that changing geopolitical conditions, including political developments in Afghanistan and Syria, could reshape global trafficking networks and create new smuggling corridors.
Security agencies said they continue to strengthen coastal surveillance and intelligence-sharing to counter the evolving threats posed by cross-border arms and drug trafficking.
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