In this village not far from the Pakistani border, the wheat harvest is only days away. Water buffaloes are resting in the shade. Farmers are preparing their fields. And drug addicts like Pargat Singh are crouched in the shadows, injecting themselves with cocktails of synthetic drugs.

Dr. Rana Ranbir Singh talked to a patient being treated for drug addiction in Punjab State.

Last Thursday, just after 11 a.m., Mr. Singh followed another man into a dark corner of a decrepit building favored by the roughly 50 addicts in this village. Cracked prescription bottles littered the ground. The other man jabbed a syringe into his arm and injected a blend of prescription drugs that delivers a six-hour high.

�''Save some for me,�'' said Mr. Singh, who is H.I.V. positive and stricken with tuberculosis. He told a photographer: �''Shoot my picture. Make me famous.�''

Throughout the border state of Punjab, whether in villages or cities, drugs have become a scourge. Opium is prevalent, refined as heroin or other illegal substances. Schoolboys sometimes eat small black balls of opium paste, with tea, before classes. Synthetic drugs are popular among those too poor to afford heroin.

The scale of the problem, if impossible to quantify precisely, is undeniably immense and worrisome. India has one of the world's youngest populations, a factor that is expected to power future economic growth, yet Punjab is already a reminder of the demographic risks of a glut of young people. An overwhelming majority of addicts are between the ages of 15 and 35, according to one study, with many of them unemployed and frustrated by unmet expectations.

For the Punjab government, the problem is hardly unknown. Private drug treatment centers, some run by quacks, have proliferated across the state, and treatment wards in government hospitals have seen a surge in patients. Three years ago, a state health official warned in a court affidavit that Punjab risked losing a whole generation to drugs. Roughly 60 percent of all illicit drugs confiscated in India are seized in Punjab.

Yet when Punjab held state elections this year, the candidates rarely spoke about drug abuse. In fact, India's Election Commission said that some political workers were actually giving away drugs to try to buy votes. More than 110 pounds of heroin and hundreds of thousands of bottles of bootleg liquor were seized in raids. During the elections, party workers in some districts distributed coupons that voters could redeem at pharmacies, activists said.

�''We have encountered the problem of liquor during elections in almost all states,�'' S. Y. Quaraishi, India's chief election commissioner, told reporters. �''But drug abuse is unique only to Punjab. This is really of concern.�''

Punjab's reluctance to treat the drug situation as a full-blown crisis is partly because the state government itself is dependent on revenue from alcohol sales. Roughly 8,000 government liquor stores operate in Punjab, charging a tax on every bottle �'' an excise that represents one of the government's largest sources of revenue. India's comptroller found that liquor consumption per person in Punjab rose 59 percent between 2005 and 2010.

�''We are promoting addiction in our state,�'' said Dr. Manjit Singh Randhawa, the city of Amritsar's civil surgeon, a job akin to chief medical officer. �''I'm getting calls from people saying they have lost their children, they have lost their breadwinners. In every village, people are falling prey to this drug abuse.�''

Ranvinder Singh Sandhu, a sociologist in Amritsar, surveyed 600 drug addicts in rural and urban areas of Punjab and found that they were usually young, poor and unemployed. He said that most villages did not have health clinics but did have three or four drugstores, which often made sizable profits selling pills and other synthetic drugs to addicts who cannot afford heroin.

Mr. Sandhu said he had completed his study six years ago, at the request of Punjab's governor, yet had never been contacted by any state official about the findings. �''The state is not conceiving it as a social problem,�'' he said. �''They are conceiving it as a personal problem.�''