The Quiet Epidemic No One Wants to Name

On the surface, Kota is a city of ambition. Every year, more than a hundred and fifty thousand students descend on this Rajasthan city…. some from as far as Manipur, others from Tamil Nadu's coastal towns… chasing a seat in an IIT or a medical college. They carry their parents' hopes in their backpacks and rent cramped rooms in hostels that smell of instant noodles and stale desperation.

What the brochures do not mention, and what the coaching institutes prefer not to acknowledge, is what many of these students do after the lights go out. In the dark lanes behind the big coaching centres, in convenience shops where the owner knows the regulars by their hostel room number, the transactions are quieter, faster, and younger than anyone in authority cares to admit.

They are sixteen years old, some of them. Seventeen. A few, reportedly, even younger.

A National Pattern, Not a Local Problem

Travel to Pune's Deccan area after ten on a Friday night and the picture shifts…. but not by much. Groups of engineering students cluster outside liquor shops on FC Road, navigating a careful arithmetic: how much can be bought with what's left of the month's pocket money, and which of tonight's group can afford to chip in.

In Hyderabad, the hostel belts near Osmania and JNTU campuses have what residents call "the circuit"…. a loose network of paan stalls, cigarette vendors, and a few more discreet contacts who deal in something stronger. In Delhi's Mukherjee Nagar, where civil services aspirants rent paying-guest accommodations and study eighteen-hour days, tobacco and alcohol have become the background score of preparation.

Varanasi. Indore. Bengaluru's PG-heavy student corridors. Chandigarh's sector lanes that stay awake past midnight. The pattern is not uniform, but the direction is unmistakable. India's student population…. the largest in the world by most estimates…. is navigating a substance landscape that previous generations did not encounter at the same age, with the same ease of access, or under the same density of pressure.

According to data from the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre at AIIMS, the average age of first substance use in India has fallen significantly over the past decade. Tobacco and alcohol remain the primary entry points, often followed by cannabis, and in some urban clusters, harder substances. The government's own National Survey on Extent and Pattern of Substance Use in India, published in 2019, found that roughly one in five males between the ages of ten and seventeen had used tobacco in some form. Those numbers have not improved.

The Architecture of a Habit

The reasons are neither mysterious nor new, but they have compounded in ways that deserve honest examination. Peer pressure has always existed. What has changed is its velocity. On a WhatsApp group, a reel, or a Snapchat story, the social proof of a habit travels in seconds. A teenager in Lucknow sees a college student in Mumbai holding a drink at a rooftop party, and the distance between observation and imitation has never been shorter.

Cinema has not helped. The image of the brooding hero exhaling smoke, the group of friends clinking glasses to celebrate freedom…. these are not neutral aesthetics. They carry cultural weight, particularly for young men navigating the turbulent passage between boyhood and an adulthood they are not sure they understand. When a blockbuster normalises drinking as a rite of passage and smoking as a marker of cool, the impact is not immediate or dramatic. It is slow, cumulative, and largely invisible until it is not.

Then there is stress…. not the vague, generalised kind that adults dismiss, but the particular, grinding pressure of competitive India. The JEE aspirant who has studied the same chapter seventeen times and still fears failure. The medical student who sleeps four hours a night. The commerce graduate who knows that a hundred other people applied for the same internship. Substance use in these contexts does not arrive as a moral failure. It arrives as a coping mechanism, offered by a friend, accepted in a moment of exhaustion, and repeated until the mechanism becomes the problem.

Curiosity and rebellion play their part too, and it would be dishonest to ignore them. Adolescence is, among other things, a prolonged argument with authority. If parents and teachers forbid something, that thing acquires a gravity it might not otherwise have. In a country where conversation about substance use within families remains awkward, whispered, or entirely absent, young people often encounter alcohol and tobacco in the company of peers before they encounter any honest discussion of what these substances actually do.

Availability is perhaps the most underestimated factor. In most cities, a fifteen-year-old with a plausible face and a hundred rupees can obtain cigarettes or a sachet of tobacco within five minutes of stepping out of a hostel. Pan masala and gutkha, despite repeated bans and regulatory action, persist in a casual, normalised way that no health warning has been able to counter. The infrastructure of supply has always outrun the infrastructure of awareness.

Key Contributing Factors

What Families Don't Say

There is a particular silence in many Indian homes around the subject of addiction. It is not malicious. It is not negligent in any calculated sense. It is simply the silence of discomfort…. the reluctance to have a conversation that implies distrust, or invites an argument, or requires a parent to acknowledge something about their child that they are not ready to acknowledge. In many households, especially those where children have moved to different cities for education, that silence has a geographical dimension as well. A phone call every few days is not the same as proximity. It cannot detect what is being hidden, or what is slowly taking hold.

Students who later sought help for dependency consistently describe a period during which their family had no idea…. not because they were particularly deceptive, but because the early stages of substance use are designed, almost by biology, to be invisible. You function. You study. You call home and say you are fine. And for a while, you are, more or less. The problem is that "more or less" has a direction, and that direction is not neutral.

The influence of shifting cultural aspiration is also worth examining without overstating it. India's growing middle class has absorbed, through streaming platforms and global media, a set of lifestyle signals in which drinking and smoking carry connotations of sophistication and adult freedom. This creates a context in which young people sometimes reach for a substance not because of chemical need but because of the identity it seems to offer…. a version of themselves that feels older, freer, more in control. The irony, of course, is that dependency is the most complete loss of control there is.

The Ground Is Not All Dark

To report only on the scale of the problem would be to miss what is also happening. Across the country, student counselling services… long neglected and chronically underfunded… are gradually gaining institutional recognition. Some colleges have introduced mandatory wellness programmes. NGOs working in addiction recovery report an uptick in families reaching out earlier, before dependence has fully set in. The social conversation, however halting, has begun to shift.

The wellness sector, too, is paying attention. Brands focused on de-addiction and holistic health are entering the consumer space with products aimed not at hospitals but at families navigating early-stage or habitual substance use. Among them is PanchAura, which markets a product called Sober Sure, described as an alcohol de-addiction serum and Freedom, described as a tobacco de-addiction spray intended as a support tool for families dealing with alcohol dependence. Whether such products prove effective at scale remains to be studied, but their presence reflects a broader awareness that addiction cannot be treated only as a clinical emergency… that families need accessible, non-stigmatising options before a problem becomes a crisis.

What It Will Take

There is an uncomfortable truth at the heart of this story. India speaks a great deal about the potential of its youth… in policy speeches, in budget documents, in the branding of every educational initiative launched in the past two decades. The language is aspirational and often genuine. But a generation's potential cannot be protected from a distance, through slogans, or by pretending that the pressures bearing down on young people today are manageable without serious, sustained attention.

The students sitting in Kota's hostels are not statistics. Neither are the college students in Pune, or the PG residents in Delhi, or the teenagers in a hundred smaller towns who have already had their first drink or their first cigarette in circumstances that nobody asked about. They are, most of them, still at the beginning of something… still capable of different outcomes. What they need is not moral instruction, which they have received in abundance and largely ignored. What they need is honesty, proximity, and the kind of family and community scaffolding that catches people before they fall too far.

What Needs to Happen