Free guide · De-addiction & rehabilitation centres · State
Unlike Punjab or Haryana, Uttar Pradesh has no dedicated, NDPS-linked de-addiction centre statute. The neighbouring-state playbooks don't transfer directly: your obligations run through general frameworks instead, and the state's Mental Health Authority, while confirmed active, does not run a public self-service registration portal.
Uttar Pradesh is one of only 19 states and Union Territories that have formally adopted the central Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010, per the Act's own official tracking site. This is the baseline registration any hospital, nursing home, or inpatient facility needs in UP, administered through the Directorate General of Medical & Health Services, Uttar Pradesh (DGMH UP). This is your starting point regardless of what kind of de-addiction centre you're building.
Because the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 defines mental illness to include conditions associated with alcohol or drug abuse, any centre offering inpatient or residential de-addiction care needs to register as a Mental Health Establishment with the State Mental Health Authority, Uttar Pradesh.
The Authority is real and active: at least one operating de-addiction centre in the Delhi NCR/Ghaziabad belt explicitly advertises itself as "Approved by: State Mental Health Authority, Uttar Pradesh." That's a direct, if informal, confirmation that UP SMHA reviews and approves applications in practice.
What we could not find, despite a direct search, is a public UP SMHA website with downloadable forms, a registration status checker, or a published list of registered establishments, the kind of self-service portal that Haryana, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Kerala and Rajasthan all run. This may simply reflect a lower public-web investment by the department rather than the absence of a functioning process; either way, the practical implication is the same: don't expect to find UP's registration form online. Plan to contact the Authority or the Directorate General of Medical & Health Services directly to get the current application format, fee, and required documents.
For context on who you'd likely be dealing with:
The National Mental Health Programme has run in UP since 1998, now active in all 75 districts through DMHP counselling centres, under a State Programme Officer based at DGMH.
Bareilly, Varanasi, and the Institute of Mental Health & Hospital, Agra, established in 1859 (originally the Agra Lunatic Asylum), spread across a 172.8-acre campus and now academically affiliated with Atal Bihari Vajpayee Medical University since 2021.
Any of these is a reasonable place to start if you need a direct line into the state's psychiatric establishment.
There's no UP-specific de-addiction statute to layer on top of the NDPS Act here, so a centre dispensing buprenorphine or another controlled substance in UP is governed by the same general NDPS Act, 1985 and Drugs and Cosmetics Rules (Schedule H1) framework that applies by default anywhere in India without a dedicated state statute.
One genuinely UP-specific detail worth knowing: the Central Bureau of Narcotics runs one of only three field offices of its Deputy Narcotics Commissioner network at Lucknow, alongside Neemuch (Madhya Pradesh) and Kota (Rajasthan). This office supervises opium-cultivation licensing and the Preventive and Intelligence Cell for Uttar Pradesh under the NDPS Rules, and is also the channel through which the Narcotics Commissioner allocates medicinal opium to state excise authorities for registered opium addicts under Section 71 of the NDPS Act. This is more relevant to opium cultivation and legacy opium-maintenance licensing than to a typical buprenorphine-based de-addiction centre, but it signals that UP carries more NDPS-administrative infrastructure than most states, worth knowing if your centre's substance-use profile includes opium specifically, which is still a live issue in parts of western UP.
A separate, smaller point: bhang (a cannabis preparation) is excluded from the NDPS Act nationally and regulated instead through state excise law; in UP, its sale and consumption is permitted and regulated by the UP Excise Department specifically. This has no direct bearing on de-addiction centre licensing, but it's a distinction worth knowing if bhang-related presentations come up in your practice, since it sits outside the NDPS framework your other patients' substances fall under.
If you're structuring as an NGO seeking grant-in-aid rather than running a private-pay centre, the relevant route is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment's National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction (NAPDDR), the same central scheme available in every state, administered through UP's nodal social welfare department rather than the health department.
UP's current NAPDDR footprint, per the most recent official Lok Sabha data reviewed (a March 2022 written reply): 19 Integrated Rehabilitation Centres for Addicts (IRCAs), 5 Community-based Peer-Led Intervention centres (CPLIs), and 9 Outreach and Drop-In Centres (ODICs), 33 centrally supported facilities in total. For scale, that 2022 snapshot was part of a national total of 355 IRCAs and 507 NAPDDR-supported facilities overall; nationally, that number has grown substantially since, a Union Minister told the Lok Sabha in April 2026 that 768 drug de-addiction and rehabilitation centres are now functioning across the country as government pushes to establish one in every district under the Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (launched by the Prime Minister in 2020). UP's own current count is very likely higher than the 33 recorded in 2022, but a more recent state-specific breakdown wasn't available in the sources reviewed for this guide.
Known individual UP IRCAs include facilities in Ghaziabad, Bareilly, and Prayagraj (Allahabad), per the Ministry's state-wise IRCA directory, and a grant-funded IRCA at Pilkhuwa, District Hapur, running since 2012.
This is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: several things that were straightforward to document for Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh simply weren't publicly available for UP at the time of writing:
Comparable to Haryana's 2010 Rules or Punjab's 2011 Rules.
No registration form, status checker, or published list of registered Mental Health Establishments, despite the Authority demonstrably being active.
No district-wise directory of licensed private de-addiction centres, the kind Haryana publishes and updates. This makes it harder for a prospective operator, or a patient's family, to verify a specific centre's registration status from outside the system.
Given UP is India's most populous state, with a correspondingly large number of small private "nasha mukti kendra" operations, this transparency gap is worth factoring into your planning: expect more direct relationship-building with your district health and mental health authorities, and less ability to self-serve through a portal, than the process would require in Haryana or Rajasthan.
No. A search of official sources turns up no "UP De-addiction Centres Rules" equivalent. Your obligations run through the general frameworks instead: clinical establishment registration and Mental Healthcare Act registration.
The State Mental Health Authority, Uttar Pradesh, for any centre offering inpatient or residential care, alongside general clinical establishment registration through the Directorate General of Medical & Health Services, UP.
No public UP SMHA web portal, downloadable forms, registration status checker, or published list of registered establishments was found at the time of writing, unlike Haryana, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Kerala or Rajasthan. The Authority is confirmed active, since real operating centres cite its approval, but you should plan to contact it or the Directorate General of Medical & Health Services directly for the current application format, fee and required documents.
The Central Bureau of Narcotics runs one of only three field offices of its Deputy Narcotics Commissioner network at Lucknow, alongside Neemuch and Kota, supervising opium-cultivation licensing and channelling medicinal opium allocations under Section 71 of the NDPS Act. This is more relevant to legacy opium maintenance than typical buprenorphine dispensing.
No. Bhang, a cannabis preparation, is excluded from the NDPS Act nationally and regulated instead through state excise law; in UP its sale and consumption is permitted and regulated by the UP Excise Department specifically.
Three: at Bareilly, at Varanasi, and the Institute of Mental Health & Hospital, Agra, established in 1859, spread across a 172.8-acre campus and academically affiliated with Atal Bihari Vajpayee Medical University since 2021.
Yes, through NAPDDR. Per the most recent official Lok Sabha data reviewed (March 2022), UP had 33 centrally supported facilities: 19 IRCAs, 5 CPLIs and 9 ODICs. Given the state's population, the current count is very likely higher.
Registration gets you the licence. The NDPS dispensing log, MHCA forms and patient records are what keep it inspection-ready. MindFlow builds all of that into your normal clinical workflow.
See the de-addiction suite →Informational, not legal advice. Reflects publicly available sources as of August 2026. The absence of a public UP SMHA portal or a UP-specific de-addiction statute in the sources available does not necessarily mean no internal process or unpublished rule exists, it means this guide could not verify one, and you should treat that as a reason to contact the Directorate General of Medical & Health Services and the State Mental Health Authority directly, not as confirmation that no registration requirement applies. Confirm current requirements directly with the relevant UP state department and a lawyer qualified in Indian health and narcotics law before making licensing or investment decisions.