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West Bengal

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Revision as of 14:14, 21 May 2026 by Eloise Zomia (talk | contribs)
West Bengal
পশ্চিমবঙ্গ
⛶
Administration
Type State
Country India
Capital Kolkata
Area 88,752 km²
Documentation
Growing Regions 3
Growing Areas 11
Accessions 0



West Bengal (পশ্চিমবঙ্গ, Pashchimbanga) is a state in eastern India, bordering Bangladesh to the east, Nepal and Bhutan to the north, and the Indian states of Sikkim, Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha. The state extends from the Himalayan foothills in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south, encompassing three of the wiki's documented growing regions: the Eastern Himalayas, The Dooars and the North Bengal Plains. It is the most extensively surveyed Indian state on the wiki, with all current Indian accessions originating from the 2025 WEB01 expedition across its northern districts.citation needed

Geography

West Bengal spans roughly 88,752 km² across three principal topographic zones: the Eastern Himalayan ranges of Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts in the far north, the alluvial Terai and Dooars foothills along the Bhutan frontier, and the Gangetic deltaic plain extending south to the Sundarbans. The state's documented cannabis populations are concentrated in the northern districts — Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and Cooch Behar — spanning all three of the state's growing regions.citation needed

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Cannabis in West Bengal

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Historical Cultivation

Pre-Colonial Period

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Colonial Period

Under British colonial rule, the Bengal Presidency — which at various points included present-day West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, Odisha and Assam — was the administrative and commercial centre of the Indian cannabis economy. The licensed cultivation belt, however, lay entirely north of the Ganges in what is now Bangladesh, and was severed from West Bengal by the Partition of 1947. West Bengal retained the consumption markets, the Calcutta wholesale infrastructure and the urban retail vending network, but lost the cultivation tract and the manufacturing warehouses on which the colonial ganja monopoly had been built.

The pre-monopoly trade. Cultivation of ganja for narcotic use is documented in Bengal from the early eighteenth century, with the earliest sustained production zone in the southern district of Jessore. The first formal British taxation came in 1790, when duties on alcohol and intoxicants were levied on landlords across the Presidency.[1] Regulation XXXIV of 1793, part of the Cornwallis Code, required a licence from the district collector for the manufacture or sale of bhang, ganja, charas and other intoxicating drugs.[1] Pre-monopoly cultivation was scattered across zamindari estates, with the Jessore tract reportedly producing some 2,000–2,400 tons annually before its suppression in 1875 and the northward consolidation of licensed cultivation to the Naogaon area of Rajshahi district.[2]

The Ganja Mahal. By the 1850s licensed ganja cultivation in Bengal had been consolidated into a small geographical zone in the northern Presidency, administratively designated the Ganja Mahal. The Mahal lay astride the boundaries of Rajshahi, Bogra and Dinajpur districts, with its headquarters at Naogaon and a cultivable extent of approximately 24,281 hectares scattered across some 177 villages.[3] In 1896–97 the Government of Bengal transferred portions of Dinajpur and Bogra into Rajshahi "to bring the whole area growing gánja under one jurisdiction."[4] The licensed area was worked under a three-circle rotation in which each circle was permitted to grow ganja once every three years.[3] Cultivators (chasis) were licensed individually, and manufactured product was held in licensed warehouses (golas) under the warehouse-keepers (golawallas) and the Excise Department, with duty levied at point of issue before passage to wholesale dealers.[5] The administrative foundation of the system was Hem Chunder Kerr's Report on the Cultivation of, and Trade in, Ganja in Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1877), which served as the principal source for both Watt's Dictionary entry and the IHDC's chapters on cultivation. Production was recorded at 760 tons in 1853, peaked at 880 tons in 1858, and declined steadily to about 170 tons by 1947;[3] in 1914 the Rajshahi Division generated Rs. 309,000 in narcotic-drugs revenue, of which 34 per cent was attributable to hemp drugs alone.[6]

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (IHDC) was appointed by Resolution of 3 July 1893, following a question put in the House of Commons on 2 March 1893 by William Sproston Caine MP requesting an enquiry into the cultivation and trade of hemp drugs in Bengal.[7] The seven-member Commission was chaired by W. Mackworth Young; its Indian members included Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy of Tahirpur, himself a major zamindar in the Rajshahi cultivation belt.[8] The Commission examined 1,193 witnesses across eight provinces and Burma, and its seven-volume report ran to some 3,281 pages, with Volume IV devoted to the evidence of Bengal and Assam witnesses, including the retired Deputy Collector Hem Chunder Kerr.[8] The Commission found that the moderate use of hemp drugs produced no injurious effect on the mind and that there was no trustworthy basis for a connection between hemp drugs and insanity. It rejected prohibition, and recommended that the Bengal regulatory model — licensed cultivation confined to a small geographical area, a monopoly gola system, and a graduated excise duty — be extended to other provinces.

The Bengal District Gazetteers. The early-twentieth-century Bengal District Gazetteers, compiled under the editorial supervision of L.S.S. O'Malley, are the principal district-level descriptions of the colonial ganja economy. The Rajshahi volume (O'Malley, 1916) is the only Bengal Gazetteer to give ganja a chapter of its own: Chapter XII, "The Ganja Mahal" (pp. 134–144), describes the nursery, the fields, transplantation, elimination of male plants, manufacture, the chatars, and the three product types of flat, round and chur ganja.[4] The Pabna (1923), Bogra (1910) and Dinajpur (1912) Gazetteers cover the immediate hinterland of the cultivation tract; the Rajshahi volume remains the canonical gazetteer description.

The Ganja Society. The Naogaon Ganja Cultivators' Cooperative Society Limited (Bengali: নওগাঁ গাঁজা চাষি সমবায় সমিতি লিমিটেড), commonly referred to as the Ganja Society or Ganja Mahajan Samity, was registered in 1917 under the Cooperative Societies Act of 1912 and organised the approximately 7,000 licensed cultivators of the Mahal as member-shareholders, with shares issued at Rs. 10 each.[3] Its central warehouse at Mukti Mor in Naogaon town was inaugurated in 1921 by the Bengal Provincial Minister Syed Nawab Ali Chowdhury.[9] The Society functioned as the executive arm of the Bengal Excise Department in the Mahal, selecting licensed land each year, issuing individual cultivator licences, weighing and grading the product, and selling it at fixed price to the government and to wholesalers. Out of its share of trade it funded schools, charitable medical clinics, a veterinary centre at Kirtipur, and road and embankment works in the cultivation tract.

Cultivation practices and product types. Bengal ganja was a seedless (sinsemilla) crop. Seedlings raised on light, well-drained homestead nurseries were transplanted in mid-September to manured fields; specialist "ganja doctors" (poddars) made repeated visits before flowering to identify and remove male and hermaphrodite plants. Harvest ran from mid-February through mid-March.[8] Three product types were distinguished for excise purposes: flat ganja (chyapta), in which cut tops were pressed flat under foot on the manufacturing platform (chatar); round ganja (gol ganja, long and short-stalked), rolled between the hands or under the foot into cylindrical form; and chur ganja, the resinous fragments and debris collected from the chatar floor.[4]

Export and trade. Wholesale dealers (mahajans) converged on the Mahal during the January–April marketing season to buy product directly at the gola, taking dispatches under transport permit by river, road and (from the 1870s) by the Eastern Bengal Railway. Bengal ganja moved across the Presidency to the major distribution centres of Dhaka, Tangail, Pabna, Santahar, Khulna, Jessore, Chittagong, Comilla, Mymensingh, Barishal and Sylhet, and overland to the United Provinces, Bihar and the Central Provinces.[2] Smuggling into Lower Burma — where cultivation, sale and possession had been prohibited under the Burma Excise Act of 1873 — was a continuing concern of the colonial excise administration. Smaller export movements to indentured-labour destinations (Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Natal) and to British and American pharmaceutical houses for medical Cannabis indica preparations are documented in the India Office Records.[5]

Partition (1947). The Radcliffe Line placed the entirety of the cultivation tract — the Naogaon, Mahadebpur, Manda and Bagmara thanas, together with the Ganja Society's Naogaon headquarters — in East Pakistan. The two provinces that took the name "Bengal" after Partition had radically different relationships to the colonial ganja economy: West Bengal retained the consumption markets and the wholesale and retail vending infrastructure of Calcutta, the Hooghly riverside and the 24 Parganas, but lost the entire licensed cultivation belt; East Pakistan retained the Ganja Mahal, the gola warehouses and the Ganja Society. The Society held some pre-Partition assets in West Bengal, including a deposit at the Bengal Cooperative Bank in Kolkata that has never been recovered.[10] It continued to operate within Pakistan (1947–71) and Bangladesh (after 1971) until cultivation was wound down in 1987 in compliance with the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its 1972 Protocol.

Post-Independence

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Modern Cultivation

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Districts

No districts documented yet.

Growing Regions

RegionHas conservation status
Eastern Himalayas
North Bengal Plains
The DooarsVulnerable

Growing Areas

Growing AreaHas growing regionHas conservation status
Chamurchi-Laxmi DuarThe Dooars
ChapramariThe Dooars
ChilapataThe DooarsVulnerable
GorumaraThe Dooars
JaldaparaThe DooarsVulnerable
JalpaiguriNorth Bengal Plains
Khairbari-DeogaonThe DooarsVulnerable
Koch BiharNorth Bengal PlainsMedium
MaynaguriNorth Bengal Plains
MekliganjThe DooarsVulnerable
Upper Jaldhaka ValleyEastern HimalayasUnknown

Accessions

Accession IDNamePriorityCollectedArea
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250012Lataguri General Population 2024High7 December 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250013Lataguri 'Neori Nadi' General Population 2024High7 December 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250014Lataguri 'Kajaldighi' General Population 2024High7 December 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250011Lataguri Feral Selection 2025Medium7 December 2025Gorumara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250015Baulbari General Population 2025High7 December 2025Maynaguri
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250010Siliguri General Population 2024High7 November 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250005Jalpaiguri General Population #8 2024High7 October 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250009Baikar Gourgram General Population 2024High7 October 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250007Panishala 'Mandir' Selection 2024High7 September 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250006Paschim Harmati General Population 2024High7 September 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250008Panishala General Population 2024High7 September 2025
ZOM-IND-UTT-0820250001Siliguri General Population 202422 August 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250003Jalpesh General Population 2024High7 August 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250001Jalpesh 'Madhabdanga' General Population 2024High7 August 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250004Jalpaiguri 'Pat Kata' Feral Selection 2025Medium7 August 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250002Jalpesh 'Jalpesh Mandir' General Population 2024High7 August 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250021Baneswar General Population 2024High31 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250023Dinhata General Population 2024High31 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250022Baneswar 'Sarkar's' Selection 2024High31 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250024Dinhata Feral Selection 2025Medium31 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250020Cooch Behar 'Khagrabari' General Population 202526 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250018Gopalpur General Population #1 2024High24 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250019Gopalpur 'Bhutani' General Population 2024High24 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250017Gopalpur General Population #2 2024High24 July 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250046Simlabari General Population #3 2024High22 July 2025Chilapata
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250049Patlakhawa General Population 2024High22 July 2025Chilapata
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250048Simlabari General Population #1 2024High22 July 2025Chilapata
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250047Simlabari General Population #2 2024High22 July 2025Chilapata
ZOM-IND-WEB-0720250016Fulkardabri Sujan's Selection #2 2024High17 July 2025Mekliganj
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250013Haldibari Feral Selection 2025Medium14 July 2025Mekliganj
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250072Jaldapara 'Hollong' General Population 2024High28 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250075Suripara Feral Selection 2025Medium28 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250071Jaldapara 'Kauchandpara' General Population #2 2024High28 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250073Salkumar 'Mondalpara' Feral Selection 2025Medium28 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250074Bhandani General Population 2024High28 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250068Makrapara General Population 2025High27 June 2025Chamurchi-Laxmi Duar
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250069Jaldapara 'Purba Madarihat' #2 Selection 2025High26 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250065Deogaon General Population #1 2024High26 June 2025Khairbari-Deogaon
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250066Deogaon General Population #2 2024High26 June 2025Khairbari-Deogaon
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250064Jaldapara 'Kauchandpara' General Population 2024High26 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250060Khairbari 'Umacharanpur' General Population #1 2024High26 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250067Deogaon General Population #3 2024High26 June 2025Khairbari-Deogaon
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250062Jaldapara 'Badaitari' Selection #1 2025High26 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250061Khairbari 'Umacharanpur' General Population #2 2024High26 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250063Jaldapara 'Badaitari' Selection #2 2025High26 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250070Khairbari 'Umacharanpur' General Population #3 2024High26 June 2025Jaldapara
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250057Hamiltonganj 'Giant Stank' Feral Selection 2025Medium25 June 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250058Hamiltonganj 'Candy Orange' Feral Selection 2025Medium25 June 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250054Hamiltonganj Feral Selection #1 2025Medium25 June 2025
ZOM-IND-WEB-0620250055Hamiltonganj Feral Selection #2 2025Medium25 June 2025
... further results

Conservation Status

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Recent News

ArticleDateDistrictCategory
News:2026-01-15/Enforcement/alipurduar-district-police-destroy-illegally-cultivated-cannabis-plants-in-purba-narathali-kumargram15 January 2026AlipurduarEnforcement
News:2025-09-24/Enforcement/cooch-behar-district-police-destroy-marijuana-cultivation-across-multiple-locations-in-coordinated-operation-224 September 2025Cooch BeharEnforcement

See Also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894, Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1894, vol. III, Appendices, Miscellaneous, p. 16.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Rahman, A.M., Nemoto, K., Matsushima, K., Uddin, S.B. & Sarwar, A.K.M.G., "A History of Cannabis (Ganja) as an Economic Crop in Bangladesh from the Late 18th Century to 1989," Tropical Agriculture and Development 66(1), 2022, pp. 21–32.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Rahman, A.M.D., Matsushima, K., Uddin, S.B., Sarwar, A.K.M.G. & Nemoto, K., "Traditional Cultivation and the Production System of Cannabis by the Ganja Society in Naogaon, Bangladesh," Tropical Agriculture and Development 67(4), 2023, pp. 99–109, DOI 10.11248/jsta.67.99.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Rajshahi, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1916, pp. 44–45.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Mills, James H., Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, ch. 3.
  6. ↑ Rahman, A. et al., "Reviving industrial hemp in Bangladesh: opportunity, challenges, and prospects," Indian Journal of Natural Products and Resources, 2024.
  7. ↑ Hansard, House of Commons, 2 March 1893, vol. 9, c. 822.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report, 1894, vol. I, ch. I.
  9. ↑ Rahman, M. Nazibor et al., "Bangladesh, Ganja (Cannabis sativa L.), Ganja society, Socio-Economic Contribution: Past, Present and Future," IOSR-JHSS 25(9), 2020, pp. 19–26.
  10. ↑ "British-era Naogaon cannabis society still basks in huge wealth," The Business Standard, Dhaka, 2022.
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