A 30-kilometre drive from the district headquarters of Kandhamal and a brief 300-metre trek off a blacktop street results in a valley the place nature nonetheless breathes in its purest type. However the calm is misleading. With out warning, a crew of police personnel armed with mowers descends on the panorama. In exactly half an hour, two acres of lush hashish plantations lie flattened.
Since November, Kandhamal police have razed over 4,000 acres of such cultivation. Their motion, they insist, just isn’t oppressive however a preventive effort to choke the availability chain earlier than hashish (also referred to as ganja, marijuana, and weed) grown on these distant slopes reaches the tip customers in distant metropolitan cities.
Between raids and area destructions, the district administration has seized 59,068 kg of hashish, and arrested 211 folks in 185 circumstances in 2025 alone – the best quantity of hashish seizure recorded by any district within the nation this yr.
“We’ve mobilised all our efforts to make sure that the ganja consignments don’t go away the district and are destroyed or seized inside our jurisdiction. The trouble required is humongous, involving each bodily and monetary exhaustion. However we’re as much as it,” Kandhamal Superintendent of Police (SP) Harish B.C. stated.
Phulbani Subdivisional Police Officer (SDPO) Subhrajit Biswal, who has been main the groups on the bottom, hopes to destroy sizeable tracts of the illicit crop earlier than the vegetation start to flower.
So, how did Kandhamal flip right into a haven for illicit cultivation?
The geography and terrain of the realm favour it. The distant, forested, and inaccessible areas of the district coupled with a local weather well-suited for hashish make it ultimate for clandestine plantations.
Ganja cultivation can also be way more profitable than common authorized crops. It sells at round ₹2,000 per kg, and costs spike to ₹3,000 throughout scarcity or intense police crackdowns. The crop is so profitable {that a} Deputy Superintendent of Police was lately suspended over allegations of involvement within the commerce.
A slice of the pie
Up to now, police groups from different States have additionally visited Kandhamal to arrest criminals, however had been discovered to have made makes an attempt to take a few of the seized consignments again with them, based on native officers.
“It isn’t straightforward to succeed in each location the place ganja is grown. Generally the crop is discovered deep contained in the forests, 15 km from the closest street, requiring hours of trekking. There’s a enormous value hooked up to the mission of uprooting these vegetation,” stated Mr. Harish.
Police sources added that the outlawed Communist Occasion of India (Maoist) additionally extends patronage to the illicit cultivation.
Though the police and the Excise Division have deployed drones to detect unlawful plantations, growers have adopted a brand new technique by decreasing patches to fewer than 150 vegetation and camouflaging them below the tree cowl to evade satellite tv for pc and drone imagery.
Figuring out the financiers behind the cultivation is much more difficult. These funders make use of villagers to develop the crop, preserving their very own id hidden.
This yr, the police have begun concentrating on those that bankroll the plantations by operating crop raids and prison investigations concurrently.
The crop is usually grown on forestlands, which belong to the Forest Division, and establishing possession and bringing the culprits to investigation is all the time a problem. “Investigators usually face difficulties in making financiers, transporters and arms sellers tied to ganja networks prosecutable. To ascertain a monetary path, it requires a particular talent set,” the Kandhamal SP stated.
To detect, discourage
In Boudh, the police discovered an individual whose account transactions bumped into crores of rupees. However the accused particular person didn’t have any discernible enterprise to again his revenue supply. The case was referred to the Revenue Tax Division for additional investigation.
To discourage villagers from rising hashish, the police have mooted the concept of participating them in different crops comparable to fruits, spices, high-value greens, beekeeping and agroforestry by the federal government’s rural employ- ment assure scheme through the sowing and harvest home windows. A strong value-chain system might additionally assist these farmers, the police recommend.
An official, who has been a part of intelligence gathering and surveillance, stated it’s ironic that in Kandhamal, whose indigenous turmeric has acquired a geographical indication tag for its medicinal worth, villagers have turned to ganja cultivation. Though villagers take part en masse within the illicit farming, the police tread cautiously. “Antagonising villagers is the very last thing on our minds,” stated an officer.
Revealed – December 16, 2025 01:42 am IST
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