The Calcutta High Court did something important this week. In Ramlal v. State of West Bengal, Justice Udaya Kumar quashed proceedings against an accused whose case traced back to a 2012 charas seizure.
The petitioner was implicated 5 years after the seizure. By the time the High Court intervened, 14 years had passed from the original event and the accused had spent roughly 9 of those years navigating a prosecution built entirely on confessions under Section 67 of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985. These statements became inadmissible the day the Supreme Court decided Tofan Singh v. State of Tamil Nadu. Once those confessions were set aside, there was nothing left. No recovery from the petitioner, no records of calls exist, no financial trail, no witness who could place him at the transaction. The Court discharged him and restored his rights under Article 21.
The legal press will report this as a Section 67 case. It is also something else: a 14-year demonstration of what happens when a prosecution proceeds on evidence it knows will not survive, in a system that has no mechanism to stop it.
This is not a Bengal story or a Punjab story. It is an Indian story — and Ramlal has simply made it impossible to look away from it this week.
India's undertrial population is among the largest in the world. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) Prison Statistics India report records that over 75 per cent of all persons in Indian jails have not been convicted of anything. They are waiting - for a charge sheet, for a witness, for a date, for a trial that the system has not yet found time to conduct. Among special and local laws, the NDPS Act is the single largest contributor to this population. Its mandatory minimum sentences, its reverse burden of proof and, above all, its Section 37 - which imposes twin conditions for bail in commercial quantity cases - mean that once a person enters the NDPS net, exit is structurally difficult regardless of the merits of the case against them.
Section 37 held the men who ran drug networks, the financiers and the operators, but jails across this country actually hold a different population. The carrier that paid ₹5,000. A larger case emerged involving the addict found with a personal quantity. Unable to prove it and unaware of the bag's contents, the young man stood there. The kingpin and the bail threshold do not distinguish between them. The years in custody distinguish neither.
The Supreme Court ruled on Tofan Singh in 2021. It established beyond doubt that Section 67 confessions - statements recorded by investigating officers - have no evidentiary value and cannot ground a prosecution. Yet, across the country, cases built on nothing but such confessions have continued to move through the system. Or more precisely, to not move - sitting in trial courts while accused persons sit in jails, sustained by a prosecution that has no incentive to bring matters to the verdict that would expose the hollowness of the original case. Ramlal is the Calcutta High Court's reckoning with one such case. It will not be the last.
There is a dimension to this crisis that courts have circled without yet answering directly. Two accused persons may face identical legal positions - proceedings founded entirely on Section 67 confessions, no independent evidence, no recovery. One has the resources to sustain litigation for 9 years and eventually reach a High Court that discharges him. A judge acquitted the other individual at trial, assuming the trial ever concludes. The constitutional result is identical. The human cost is not. Article 14 has something to say about a system in which the remedy for wrongful prosecution is available only to those who can afford to pursue it. Ramlal has brought that question to the surface without yet answering it. Eventually, a court will.
Several states publish NDPS conviction rates as evidence of their enforcement effectiveness. Punjab, under its Yudh Nashean Virudh campaign, reported an 88 per cent conviction rate in 2025 - 6,488 convictions from 7,373 decided cases - and 89 per cent so far in 2026. These numbers are significant and we should not dismiss them.
But a conviction rate counts only the cases that reach a verdict. It has nothing to say about cases that do not. The cases that proceed swiftly to verdict are the cases with evidence strong enough to sustain that pace. Frequently, cases stall because someone brought them in the wrong form, or shouldn't have brought them at all. The conviction rate is a State's record in one category. The undertrial count is its record on the other. Both are true. Only one is being published.
This is the institutional gap that Ramlal exposes. A prosecution machinery can record a high conviction rate while simultaneously holding tens of thousands of persons in pre-trial custody in cases it has neither the evidence nor the intention to bring swiftly to trial. The current reporting framework allows these two facts to coexist without contradiction because different registers count them: the verdict register and the jail register. No existing mechanism requires anyone to read these registers together.
The national picture has local concentrations. Some of the most acute NDPS under trial numbers in the country are in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan - states where enforcement campaigns have been intensive and where trial infrastructure has not kept pace with arrest volumes.
In Punjab, data placed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court in undertrial monitoring proceedings records 36,846 inmates in the state's jails, of whom 30,339 - over 82 percent - are undertrials. Ludhiana Central Jail holds 3,489 under-trials out of a total population of 4,404. Kapurthala holds 3,750. The dominant offence category in both, as any district legal services authority officer in Punjab will confirm, is NDPS.
Across many orders in NDPS undertrial cases, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has noted that the non-appearance of police prosecution witnesses in these trials has become a pattern, rather than an occasional occurrence. The Court has issued directions to enforce compliance with judicial summons more than once. The pattern has continued.
What compounds the difficulty is the position some prosecution agencies take in bail hearings within these stalled matters. Prosecution agencies oppose bail because the trial is at its fag end. Simultaneously, they have started proclamation proceedings under Section 84 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita against accused persons who have not yet appeared before the court at all. Section 84 is not a provision for the conclusion of a trial. It is a provision for securing the attendance of an absconder. These two positions cannot simultaneously be true and a bail court may require the prosecution to choose between them.
Punjab is the sharpest example, but the structure of the problem is national. Every state that has run an intensive NDPS enforcement campaign without building corresponding trial capacity has produced a version of this arithmetic. Arrests continue to pile up. The trials are not moving. The undertrials wait.
Alongside those waiting for trial is a quieter population: persons who have already got bail but cannot use it. The court granted the order, which is on record. They are still inside because the surety condition requires a local property-owning guarantor and the family that spent whatever it had on legal fees has no one left to offer.
The Supreme Court in Hussainara Khatoon v. Home Secretary, State of Bihar held that prolonged pre-trial detention violates Article 21. In Moti Ram v. State of Madhya Pradesh, Justice Krishna Iyer held that bail conditions set beyond a person's realistic means are not bail at all; they are its denial in another form. Both judgments are decades old. Neither jail authorities have implemented these systematically in the district jails where their enforcement matters most.
The remedy is neither complicated nor expensive. Every district legal services authority has the mandate and the mechanism to conduct a periodic review identifying persons who hold valid bail orders but remain in custody only because they cannot meet the surety condition. It requires a list, a legal aid lawyer and a court date. What it has not had, in most jurisdictions, is the direction to do it.
When the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrests a businessman or a politician, the conviction rate question arises within the week. It is the right question. The state that exercises the power of arrest owes an accounting of what that arrest produced.
After being acquitted because of the police witness's absence, the man, who had spent 3 years in jail, had no one ask that question about him from any district or state. No channel covered his acquittal. No Member of Parliament asks what proportion of NDPS undertrials ultimately do not get convicted after spending over 2 years in custody. Those two facts - the years of custody and the eventual outcome that followed them - are not required to be connected by any reporting framework.
It's simple. The people the ED arrests have legal teams and press offices. The carrier possesses nothing. Article 21 does not make that distinction. The administration has decided to.
Ramlal is one man's case from Calcutta. The principle it restates - that the State cannot hold a person for years in proceedings built on inadmissible evidence and call that justice - belongs to every undertrial in every overcrowded jail in this country who is waiting for a trial that the prosecution is in no hurry to conclude.
Dr. Ajay Kumar Pandey is the President of Supreme Court Life Members Bar Association and the Founder & Managing Partner of 4C Supreme Law International.