When Sagarika Nath became superintendent of police in Odisha's Khordha district, she noticed something the usual crime statistics didn't capture: college students withdrawing from friends, vape pens in hostel bins, parents calling in desperation. The drug problem was real. But so was the fact that punishment alone wasn't stopping it.
"We are not here to punish. We are here to pull you back," she told students in 2024, launching Project Sampark — a two-part response that tackled both supply chains and the hopelessness that made drugs appealing in the first place.
One team focused on dismantling trafficking networks. The other did something less common in Indian policing: monthly conversations in every police jurisdiction about suicide prevention, mental health, and actual ways out. Not lectures. Conversations. Nath held these sessions herself, building the kind of trust that doesn't exist when police only show up to arrest people.
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Start Your News DetoxOver 5,000 students participated. The numbers matter, but the shift matters more. In a system where drug use among college students has been climbing, Nath's approach asked a different question: What if we treated this as a mental health crisis instead of purely a criminal one.
Project Sampark wasn't her only initiative. Project Durga trained girls in self-defense and awareness. Chota Cop brought children into community safety conversations. In Sundargarh district, she introduced facial recognition for traffic enforcement — modernizing systems while freeing officers for community work. Each program was designed around a single principle: empower people rather than just control them.
She also pushed beyond city limits into rural Odisha, where drug networks operate in deeper silence and mental health support is nearly nonexistent. For Nath, jurisdiction was never the limit — responsibility was.
By 2025, her work caught national attention. She was appointed superintendent of police at the National Investigation Agency, India's premier counter-terrorism body. The lessons from Khordha — that safety built on trust outpaces safety built on fear — now inform work at the country's highest security levels.
What Nath has done is quietly reframe what police work can be. Fighting drugs stops being about arrest numbers and starts being about whether a 19-year-old decides to stay in school instead of disappearing into addiction. That's not soft policing. It's the hardest kind — the kind that requires showing up, listening, and refusing to write off a generation.
