Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
02-01-2025
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ ODISHA: Ajay Rout is an Indigenous farmer in a remote village in a southern district of India’s Odisha state.
The village is surrounded by forest and hills, with the nearest market 10km (6.2 miles) away.
The 34-year-old grows sweetcorn and vegetables on his 0.2 hectares (0.5 acres) for both his family to eat and to sell at the market.
Rout said this income is a pittance, so he has taken up growing cannabis, a banned drug, for a better income.
He has about 1,000 cannabis plants located deep in the hills, which require a trek of at least two hours each way to get to because the path is full of boulders and rocks, making it almost impossible for him to ride his bicycle or motorcycle.
The cultivation of cannabis also known as hemp, marijuana, weed and ganja, is legal for medicinal use only in several states, including Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, which became a federal territory in 2019. Odisha is not one of them.
India had no legislation on narcotic substances until November 1985, when it brought in a law including a ban on the use of cannabis.
The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 makes it illegal for a person to cultivate, possess, sell, buy, and consume narcotic and psychotropic substances, and doing so can lead to severe fines and imprisonment of up to 20 years.
Risky but profitable
Rout, who has been in this business for the past eight years, served three months in prison in 2017 and has been out on bail ever since. The income from the business, huge for him, overcomes the fear of being involved in it.
“We live in a hilly terrain where traditional farming has a very limited scope. I hardly earn 30,000 rupees ($357) a year by growing vegetables and sweetcorn whereas I can easily make 500,000 rupees ($5,962) in just five to six months in cannabis cultivation,” he told Al Jazeera after being assured that his real name would not be disclosed.
Rout said he and other cannabis growers generally choose remote locations in the hills for their plantations to protect themselves from police raids. “We are lucky to live amid hills as cops don’t raid here as the path is too difficult to trek and reach the plantation area,” he said.
The planting season starts at the end of July. Typically, it takes five months for the flowers to grow, which are then plucked, dried under the sun, packed and sold to traders. An 8- to 10-foot tall (2.4- to 3-metre-tall) plant produces 1kg (2.2 pounds) of cannabis at a cost of 500-600 rupees ($5.8 to $7) per kilogramme. Farmers sell that to traders for 1,000 to 1,500 rupees ($12 to $18) per kilogramme but “all the trees do not give similar production and most of them bear no flowers at all. Excessive rains are harmful for the crop,” said Deepankar Nayak, 37, a farmer.
Change in lifestyle
Cannabis cultivation, even though banned in Odisha, is a highly lucrative business for the farmers and has brought them overnight riches.
Subhankar Das, 38, who lives in the same village as Rout, told Al Jazeera that he recently changed the flooring in his house from concrete to marble tiles with the income from the illegal trade. He has also bought three motorcycles. His children are enrolled in local language schools, but he is planning to shift them to English language schools, which are a lot more expensive.
