Police witnesses accepted that nothing was recovered from her or her bag. The Supreme Court has quashed the NDPS prosecution of the woman, saying drug users are victims at the last stage of the narcotics supply chain.
New Delhi: Setting aside the Telangana High Court’s judgment of December 29, 2025 in Criminal Petition No. 14974 of 2025, the Supreme Court has quashed the proceedings under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 against a woman arraigned as the fourth accused in a Telangana case. It observed that persons at the end of the supply chain should not be treated merely as offenders and that law enforcement should focus on curbing availability and breaking the supply chain [Sanjana Bhaskaran v. State of Telangana & Anr.].
The appeal arising out of SLP (Crl) No. 3435 of 2026 was allowed by an order dated October 9, 2026 from a Bench of Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice K Vinod Chandran.
Last in the chain
In one way, the Court said, the appellant was herself a victim, being last in the chain of supply. It cautioned that prosecuting such persons and keeping them in custody before trial can push them further into the narcotics trade through the associations they form in prison, and said that the focus of enforcement must be elsewhere:
“Curbing availability and breaking the supply chain shall be the focus”
The Bench recorded the State’s position that it would not press charges if the appellant agreed to undergo de-addiction treatment, but declined to order that course, since it found no complicity in conscious possession.
The prosecution’s account
The prosecution case, as recorded, is that police acted on information about sellers near a college, set up surveillance and saw the appellant approach two men standing by a scooter. She allegedly received a cover containing marijuana and put it in her bag. All three were apprehended, and the two alleged sellers had a larger quantity of marijuana in the scooter. The prosecution also relied on a medical test said to have detected marijuana use by the appellant.
Why the case could not stand
Nothing was recovered from the appellant or her bag, the police witnesses accepted, so the case against her rested on statements attributed to the co-accused and on her own alleged confession. The Bench noted that the prosecution was built on confessional statements and recalled the settled position that a confession made to the police cannot be relied on. With no recovery from her, it held that going ahead with a trial would serve no purpose:
“there would be no useful purpose served in carrying out a prosecution against the appellant.”
The operative order
Leave was granted and the appeal allowed. The appellant’s arraignment in the Sessions Case was quashed and pending applications were rejected. The Court clarified that it had not examined the case of the other accused in S.C. NDPS No. 91/2025, so the proceedings against them are unaffected by this order.
A public-health reading of the NDPS Act
The order reads the NDPS Act through a public-health lens: a person who consumes and is caught at the last link of the chain is not the target the law is chiefly aimed at. It also repeats a practical lesson for prosecutors, that a case resting only on co-accused statements and confessions, with nothing recovered from the accused, is unlikely to survive.
The observations were made on the facts of this appeal and do not decide the position of the other accused, whose trial continues.
Case Title: Sanjana Bhaskaran v. State of Telangana & Anr. [arising out of SLP (Crl) No. 3435 of 2026]
Bench: Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice K Vinod Chandran, Supreme Court of India
Date of Order: October 9, 2026
Appearances: Advocates Dinesh Kothari, BS Randhawa, Gopal Singh Chauhan, Harsh Gupta and Goldy Goyal (AOR) for the appellant; Advocates Devina Sehgal (AOR), Srikanth Varma Mudunuru and Yatharth Kansal for the respondents