No drugs found on him, yet denied bail for 2 years

The lab report said: 'Could not quantify the drug.' But the prosecution still said he had a commercial quantity. The Supreme Court had a problem with that.

One lakh thirty-seven thousand six hundred and sixty-five tablets. Seized from four locations across Chennai. Packed for export to the United States, disguised as herbal products. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) was certain: this was a massive haul of psychotropic substances—drugs that affect the mind, such as sedatives or stimulants—enough to trigger the strictest bail conditions under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS Act). But when the test reports came back from the laboratory, they carried a single line that would unravel the entire prosecution's case: "Quantitative analysis could not be done."

The question that hung over two separate bail petitions—one from the alleged mastermind, another from the proprietor of the herbal medicine business—was deceptively simple: if the government's own lab cannot tell you how much of a drug is in the seized material, can you still claim it is a "commercial quantity" and deny the accused bail?

When the DRI knocked on four doors

In October 2019, DRI officers conducted simultaneous searches at four locations in Chennai. They recovered approximately 1,37,665 tablets, which they suspected were psychotropic substances. The tablets were allegedly being exported to the USA, packaged to look like herbal health products. The search warrants, signed and stamped, were laid out on tables as officers counted the tablets into evidence bags—stack after stack of blister packs and loose pills, filling the room with the faint chemical smell of unmarked pharmaceuticals.

Raja Chandrasekharan (A-1) was the proprietor of a herbal medicine business. He was arrested in October 2019 along with two others (A-2 and A-3). Five months later, in March 2020, the DRI arrested Bharat Chaudhary (A-4) in Jaipur. He was alleged to be the mastermind—the man who ordered the procurement and arranged the export. No contraband was found at his premises.

The case against A-4 rested almost entirely on statements recorded from the other accused under Section 67 of the NDPS Act (a provision that allows DRI officers to summon and record statements from any person believed to be connected with a drug offence).

The transit bail and the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate

When A-4 was arrested in Jaipur in March 2020, he was first produced before the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate in that city. The magistrate granted him transit bail—a temporary relief allowing him to travel to Chennai for the remand proceedings. It was a brief, procedural moment: the magistrate's bench, the file thin with only the arrest memo, the accused standing in handcuffs. But that transit order marked the beginning of a legal battle that would stretch nearly two years.

Once in Chennai, A-4 was remanded to judicial custody by the NDPS court. The trial court would later note that no contraband had been recovered from his possession at the time of arrest—only the co-accused's statements tied him to the seized tablets.

The trial judge saw the hole

In November 2020, the Special Judge for Economic Offences and NDPS Cases in Chennai granted bail to A-4. The judge's handwritten order, signed with a firm hand, noted three critical problems. First, no contraband was found at A-4's premises. Second, the test reports showed that many of the seized tablets were sex enhancement drugs—substances that fall outside the scope of the NDPS Act entirely. Third—and most damning—the quantitative analysis was incomplete. The lab could not determine how much of the alleged psychotropic substance was actually present in the tablets.

Under the NDPS Act, the quantity of the drug determines the severity of punishment and bail. "Small quantity" and "commercial quantity" are defined in the Schedule to the Act. If the quantity is commercial, Section 37 of the NDPS Act kicks in—a provision that imposes twin conditions for bail: the court must be satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to believe the accused is not guilty, and that the accused is unlikely to commit another offence while on bail. This is a very high bar. But if the quantity is not commercial, the ordinary bail provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure apply, which are far more lenient.

The Special Judge also relied on a landmark Supreme Court judgment delivered earlier that year: Tofan Singh v. State of Madras. In that case, a five-judge bench had held that statements recorded under Section 67 of the NDPS Act are confessions to a police officer and are therefore inadmissible as evidence. This meant the entire case against A-4—built on co-accused statements—was on shaky ground.

The High Court reversed—then the Supreme Court stepped in

The DRI appealed to the Madras High Court. In July 2021, a single judge of the High Court cancelled A-4's bail and also rejected A-1's bail application. The High Court took a different view of the evidence, finding that the sheer volume of tablets and the allegations of a cross-border conspiracy justified continued detention.

Both A-4 and A-1 approached the Supreme Court. A-4's petition was filed as a Special Leave Petition (SLP) against the cancellation of his bail. A-1's petition was a direct challenge to the rejection of his bail application.

The Supreme Court bench—comprising Chief Justice N.V. Ramana, Justice Surya Kant, and Justice Hima Kohli—heard the matters together. The courtroom fell silent as the bench began reading the lab report. The court had to decide whether the High Court was right to ignore the incomplete test reports and the Tofan Singh ruling.

The lab report that broke the prosecution's case

The Supreme Court's reasoning was sharp and focused. The court began with the test reports. The DRI had seized 1,37,665 tablets, but the laboratory reports for several of these samples expressly stated: "Quantitative analysis could not be carried out for want of facilities." In plain language, the government's own forensic lab could not tell the court how much of the alleged psychotropic substance was present in the tablets. The silence in the courtroom when that line was read out was palpable—the prosecution's strongest case had just been reduced to a question mark.

Without quantitative analysis, the court held, the prosecution could not claim at a preliminary stage that the accused was in possession of a "commercial quantity" of psychotropic substances. The number of tablets alone was irrelevant. What mattered was the weight of the actual drug content. If the lab could not determine that, the strict bail conditions of Section 37 could not be triggered.

The court then turned to the statements recorded under Section 67. Following Tofan Singh, these statements were inadmissible as confessions. The prosecution could not rely on them to implicate A-4, from whom no contraband had been recovered. The court described this reliance as "too tenuous a ground to sustain denial of bail."

As for A-1, the court noted that he had been in custody for over two years by the time the Supreme Court heard the matter. The charge sheet had been filed. The case against him, like the case against A-4, rested primarily on co-accused statements and electronic evidence whose scientific verification was still pending.

The broader impact of Tofan Singh

The Tofan Singh judgment, decided in February 2021, has been reshaping NDPS bail jurisprudence across the country. Before that ruling, Section 67 statements were routinely used by the DRI and the Narcotics Control Bureau to secure convictions and deny bail. The five-judge bench's holding—that a DRI officer is a "police officer" for the purposes of recording confessions—stripped these statements of their evidentiary value.

In Bharat Chaudhary and Raja Chandrasekharan, the Supreme Court applied this principle squarely to the bail stage. The court held that if the prosecution's case rests primarily on Section 67 statements, and no contraband is recovered from the accused, the denial of bail is unsustainable. This reasoning will have immediate consequences for hundreds of pending NDPS cases across the country, where accused persons have been languishing in custody solely on the basis of such statements.

The court also cited Sanjeev Chandra Agarwal v. Union of India, a decision from October 2021, which reinforced the principle that bail cannot be denied on the basis of weak or unverified evidence at a preliminary stage.

What the court ordered

The Supreme Court quashed the High Court's order cancelling A-4's bail and restored the Special Judge's November 2020 order granting him bail. For A-1, the court directed his release on bail, subject to the satisfaction of the trial court.

The court was careful to note that its observations were limited to the question of bail and would not influence the final trial. But the ratio—the central legal principle—is clear and will have immediate consequences for hundreds of pending NDPS cases across the country.

Three principles emerge from this judgment. First, if the prosecution cannot produce a quantitative analysis showing that the seized material contains a commercial quantity of a psychotropic substance, the strict bail conditions of Section 37 do not apply. Second, statements recorded under Section 67 of the NDPS Act cannot be used as the primary basis to deny bail, following Tofan Singh. Third, where no contraband is recovered from an accused and the case rests on co-accused statements and unverified electronic evidence, bail should not be denied.

THE PLAY: If your client is in NDPS custody and the FSL report says "quantitative analysis not done," file a bail application immediately—the prosecution cannot claim commercial quantity, and Section 37's twin conditions do not apply.

The court ended where it began: with a lab report that could not answer the one question that mattered. The stack of 1,37,665 tablets, sitting in evidence bags in a Chennai storeroom, remained silent—their chemical composition still a mystery that the prosecution could not solve.