Along the dimly-lit corridors of the Maharao Bhim Singh Hospital in Kota, two policemen escort a near comatose Manoj Kumar back to the de-addiction ward. Only an hour before, Kumar, a smack addict, had escaped from his ward only to be caught inside the MBS Hospital police station. Here, Kumar was hoping to steal the policemen’s uniforms, which he would then sell to buy more brown sugar to slake his addiction. But for the police and hospital staff, Kumar’s antics raised no interest—he is the third such patient in one week to escape from the ward.

The city of Kota in South Rajasthan, famed for churning out close to one-third of the country’s IIT graduates, is also churning out a seamier side as the police report an unusually high number of brown sugar peddlers and addicts. With only one hospital in the city that has a 10-bed de-addiction ward, the drug scourge is so serious that many addicts end up behind bars and when they come out, they go back to their syringes and a wasted life. The situation is so bleak that the police have had to routinely slip in a dose or two to inmates in jails and lock-ups to prevent them from killing or harming themselves—something that usually invites a magisterial inquiry against the police.

Kota is a city of contrasts, with modern buildings and coaching centres dotting the newer, southern regions of the city while the older parts of this erstwhile princely capital is home to a more sinister reality, of crime and drugs. Inside the old city’s dark lanes are garbage heaps and junkyards, littered with tinfoil and used syringes.

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