NCB v. Mohit Aggarwal: 'reasonable grounds' under Section 37 NDPS mean credible and plausible grounds

The facts in brief

Narcotics Control Bureau v. Mohit Aggarwal arose from a commercial-quantity seizure. Acting on secret information on 9 January 2020, an NCB team searched a courier godown at Kapasehra, New Delhi, and opened a parcel that had been mis-declared as "surgical items". It contained 50,000 Tramadol tablets weighing 20 kilograms.

The parcel had been booked by one Gaurav Kumar Aggarwal, who in his statement under Section 67 of the NDPS Act said he had bought the tablets from the respondent, Mohit Aggarwal, without any bill or prescription, and that the respondent in turn sourced them from a supplier at Jaipur. On the disclosures that followed, the raiding team reached a co-accused's godown and recovered a far larger haul — 6,64,940 tablets and capsules of Tramadol, Zolpidem and Alprazolam weighing around 328.82 kilograms, along with injections and cough-syrup bottles.

The respondent was charged under Sections 8/22 and 29 of the NDPS Act and taken into custody on 11 January 2020. The Special NDPS Judge twice refused him bail. On 16 March 2021 a single judge of the Delhi High Court, invoking Section 439 of the Criminal Procedure Code, granted bail — reasoning that the Section 67 confessions were inadmissible after Tofan Singh and that nothing incriminating had been recovered from the respondent's own possession. The NCB appealed.

The Section 37 threshold

Section 37 makes NDPS offences cognizable and non-bailable and, for offences involving commercial quantity, superimposes a further gate. Bail may not be granted unless the Public Prosecutor has had an opportunity to oppose it and, where opposed, the court is satisfied that there are "reasonable grounds for believing" the accused is not guilty and is unlikely to commit an offence while on bail. These twin conditions are cumulative, and they sit on top of — not in place of — the ordinary limitations under the CrPC.

The appeal turned on what that satisfaction demands. Writing for the Bench of Chief Justice N.V. Ramana and Justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli, Justice Kohli traced the phrase through the Court's own authority — Collector of Customs v. Ahmadalieva Nodira and State of Kerala v. Rajesh, both holding that "reasonable grounds" means "something more than prima facie grounds" and "contemplates substantial probable causes" for believing the accused not guilty.

Credible and plausible grounds

The judgment then distilled the standard:

To sum up, the expression "reasonable grounds" used in clause (b) of Sub-Section (1) of Section 37 would mean credible, plausible and grounds for the Court to believe that the accused person is not guilty of the alleged offence.

That is a demanding threshold. The satisfaction cannot rest on the absence of recovery from the accused alone, nor on a bare assertion of innocence; it requires facts and circumstances on record that can positively persuade the court the accused would not have committed the offence — coupled with the further satisfaction that he will not offend while on bail.

The Court was careful, though, to fix the limits of the exercise. At the bail stage a judge is not required to record a finding that the accused is not guilty, and is not expected to weigh the evidence to decide guilt. The enquiry is confined to whether reasonable grounds for believing in non-guilt are available on the material as it stands — a prima facie view for the limited purpose of bail, not a mini-trial.

Applying that lens, the Bench agreed that the retracted Section 67 confessions had to be set aside under Tofan Singh v. State of Tamil Nadu. But the confessions were not the only material. Even leaving them aside, the respondent's disclosures had led the NCB to the co-accused's godown and the enormous seizure that followed, and the call-detail records showed the accused in contact with one another. That circumstantial matrix, the Court held, ought to have dissuaded the High Court from concluding there were reasonable grounds to believe the respondent not guilty. To assume innocence merely because nothing was found in his own possession was "premature at this stage".

What does not relax the rigour

The most cited passage of the judgment addresses the arguments that habitually accompany NDPS bail pleas — that the accused has been in custody a long time, that the chargesheet is filed, that the trial has begun.

In other words, delay-based and procedural-milestone arguments do not, on their own, satisfy the statutory gate. The Section 37 enquiry is substantive: has the accused shown credible, plausible grounds to believe he is not guilty? Passage of time in custody and the mechanics of the prosecution's progress do not answer that question, and cannot be pressed into service as a substitute for it.

Holding that the narrow parameters of Section 37 had not been met, the Court allowed the appeals, quashed the High Court's order, cancelled the bail bonds, and directed the respondent to be taken back into custody.

The strict pole of the Section 37 debate

Mohit Aggarwal is the prosecution-favouring anchor of the modern Section 37 jurisprudence. It reads the twin conditions strictly, refuses to let custody length or trial progress dilute them, and insists on positive, credible material before liberty can follow.

It is best understood against the countervailing pole. Less than a year later, in Mohd. Muslim v. State (NCT of Delhi) (2023), a two-judge bench granted bail to an NDPS undertrial despite Section 37, reasoning that the constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial under Article 21 cannot be defeated by a statutory bar where an accused faces years of incarceration with the trial nowhere near conclusion. There, prolonged custody with no realistic end to the trial became a decisive factor — the very consideration Mohit Aggarwal had said was not, by itself, enough.

The two decisions are not squarely irreconcilable: Mohit Aggarwal speaks to the content of the "reasonable grounds" enquiry, while Mohd. Muslim invokes Article 21 to prevent Section 37 from operating as a sentence without trial. But they pull in opposite directions, and which one a court leans on tends to decide the bail application. High Courts continue to cite Mohit Aggarwal to refuse bail on the strength of the evidentiary threshold, and Mohd. Muslim to grant it on undue-delay grounds. The tension between the statutory rigour of the one and the liberty imperative of the other remains the live fault line in NDPS bail practice.

Why the case matters

For practitioners, Mohit Aggarwal supplies three working propositions. First, the "reasonable grounds" standard is credible-and-plausible, not merely prima facie — the defence must point to affirmative material, not just gaps in the prosecution. Second, retracted Section 67 statements are inadmissible after Tofan Singh, but the court may still weigh the independent circumstantial evidence they led to. Third, custody length and procedural milestones are not stand-alone passports to bail under Section 37; they must be married to a genuine Article 21 delay argument of the Mohd. Muslim kind to carry weight. It is the case the prosecution reaches for, and the one the defence must distinguish, whenever commercial-quantity bail is argued.

Related on Valkya

• Mohd. Muslim v. State (NCT of Delhi): the Article 21 counterweight to strict Section 37
• Satender Kumar Antil v. CBI: the bail categorisation framework
• Tofan Singh v. State of Tamil Nadu: Section 67 statements inadmissible
• Frank Vitus v. Narcotics Control Bureau: bail conditions and privacy
• Noor Aga v. State of Punjab: the NDPS reverse burden

Sources

1. Supreme Court of India — Narcotics Control Bureau v. Mohit Aggarwal, judgment dated 19 July 2022 (Criminal Appeal Nos. 1001-1002 of 2022), full text: judgment PDF
2. LiveLaw — "Credible & Plausible" Grounds To Believe Accused Is Not Guilty Required To Grant Bail Under Section 37 NDPS Act
3. LiveLaw — Supreme Court Weekly Round Up: July 17 To July 23, 2022