The India-Myanmar border has long been recognised as one of the Indian Subcontinent’s most complex frontier zones. This complexity stems not only from its governance but from the way physical geography and cross-border social ties intersect. Stretching across rugged hills, dense forests, and sparsely administered terrain, the border cuts through regions where state presence is uneven, and mobility has historically been shaped more by local networks than by formal boundary controls. These characteristics have also made the corridor vulnerable to transnational illicit economies, particularly drug trafficking linked to production hubs in the Golden Triangle region.
The accompanying interactive map visualises publicly reported drug seizures during 2024–2025, as disclosed by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI). Mapping these incidents allows patterns to be assessed spatially rather than anecdotally, helping to identify recurring routes, clusters, and transit zones that are not immediately visible through individual press reports alone.
Public reporting by Indian law enforcement agencies over the past decade has repeatedly highlighted large seizures of heroin, methamphetamine tablets, and precursor chemicals along these routes. Viewing these incidents at a macro scale helps move the discussion beyond individual cases and toward a structural understanding of how geography conditions illicit flows.
India’s eastern borderlands, particularly in Manipur and Mizoram, serve as natural gateways between Myanmar’s Sagaing and Chin regions and India’s interior markets. Towns such as Moreh on the Indian side and Tamu across the border function as key transit points for both formal trade and informal cross-border movement. From these nodes, road networks extend to Imphal, Aizawl, and further west into Assam and beyond, thereby embedding the borderlands within wider national transport corridors.
Once these consignments cross into India through border towns such as Moreh and Champhai, they rarely remain confined to the Northeast. Instead, they are rapidly dispersed along established road and rail corridors into interior consumption and redistribution hubs, including metropolitan centres in both North and South India.
What the Map Shows
The interactive map accompanying this analysis is built from publicly reported seizure locations, represented as points derived from official press releases and law enforcement statements. The map does not attempt to depict real-time trafficking routes or operational details. Instead, it highlights where seizures have repeatedly occurred, depicting spatial concentrations and proximity to known transport corridors and border crossings.
The interactive map allows users to visualise the reported DRI seizure locations and key transit towns along the Indo–Myanmar border. Layers can be toggled on and off, and different basemaps can be selected using the basemap switcher in the top right corner to view the data against satellite imagery, a terrain map and a simplified cartographic background.
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Large sections of the Indo-Myanmar border run through rugged hill ranges, dense forest cover, and sparsely inhabited zones where continuous monitoring is difficult. In these areas, limited road access, weather conditions, and the absence of permanent surveillance infrastructure create environments where cross-border movement can occur with relatively low visibility. The lack of recorded seizure points in such areas should therefore be interpreted not as an absence of smuggling activity, but as an indicator of where geography reduces the likelihood of detection and public reporting. From a spatial perspective, these less legible zones function as permeable corridors, allowing flows to bypass monitored crossings and re-emerge closer to interior road networks, reinforcing the role of terrain and patrol constraints in shaping trafficking geography. Seizure points are not evenly distributed across the border, but instead, they cluster near a small number of known transit towns and road-accessible crossings. Locations such as Aizawl and Champhai emerge as repeated points of seizures in the dataset, indicating their continued relevance as entry points rather than one-off enforcement hotspots. This pattern suggests that seizures tend to occur not in remote border terrain, but at points where illicit movement intersects with usable transportation infrastructure. Enforcement activity appears most visible where mobility becomes easier for the state. Despite enforcement actions in these known transport zones, the same pathways continue to appear in public reporting, implying that route selection is driven by structural advantages, terrain, connectivity, and access rather than short-term tactical decisions. The map also highlights notable gaps. Large stretches of the border show little or no recorded seizure activity, even though they share similar terrain characteristics. This absence should not be read as an absence of trafficking, but rather as a reflection of limited reporting, surveillance, or interception capacity.
Taken together, the spatial patterns reinforce a critical policy insight: drug trafficking in the Indo–Myanmar borderlands is as much a geographic problem as a policing one. While enforcement pressure at isolated locations may disrupt individual consignments, sustained impact depends on understanding where movement is geographically advantageous and where state presence remains structurally thin.