Sepahijala (appellation)
More actions
| Sepahijala | |
|---|---|
| Sipahijala | |
| ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000 | |
| Hierarchy | |
| Gene Pool | South Asian Gene Pool |
| Growing Region | Indo-Burman Range |
| Growing Area | Tripura Hills |
| Geography | |
| Country | India |
| Province/State | Tripura |
| District | Sepahijala District |
| Coordinates | 23.545, 91.305 |
| Landscape | |
| Terrain | Low hills (tillas) and valleys along the Bangladesh border, under forest and rubber |
| Climate | |
| Climate Type | Humid subtropical |
| Rainfall | 2,175 mm |
| Seasons | South-west monsoon (Jun–Sep), north-east monsoon (Oct–Dec), winter (Jan–Feb), summer (Mar–May) |
| Growing history | |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Sepahijala is a landrace cannabis appellation in the Tripura Hills growing area of the Indo-Burman Range, in Sepahijala District of Tripura, in north-east India, on the state's border with Bangladesh. Its cultivation lies in the low forested hills of the Sonamura and Bishalgarh subdivisions, around Sonamura, Kalamchoura, Boxanagar, Melaghar, Jatrapur, Bishalgarh and Bishramganj, where the district police, the Border Security Force, the Assam Rifles and the Tripura State Rifles have destroyed plantations of ganja since 2018. In January 2026 a single day's operation in the Kalamchoura and Ghatigarh forests destroyed about 1.9 million immature plants on some 650 acres (263 ha).[1]
The crop is grown for sale outside the state. Officials say the dry ganja is smuggled to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Bangladesh, and residents of Sonamura told a reporter in 2018 that the trade had grown over the previous 10 to 15 years.[2][3]
Geography
Sepahijala District covers 1,043 km² between Bangladesh to the west, West Tripura District to the north, and Gomati, Khowai and South Tripura districts to the east and south.[4][5] The district has three subdivisions, Bishalgarh, Sonamura and Jampuijala.[6] The eradication drives reported since 2018 have been in the first two, in the areas of the Sonamura, Kalamchoura, Jatrapur, Melaghar, Bishalgarh, Bishramganj and Madhupur police stations.[7]
Western Tripura is a country of tillas, low rounded hills of older alluvium that lie on either side of the river valleys between the hill ranges.[8]: 198 The district holds 251 km² of forest, 126 km² of it reserve forest.[9] The Sepahijala Wildlife Sanctuary, of about 18.5 km², lies some 25 km from Bishalgarh.[10]
The plantations destroyed since 2018 lay on forest land: forest-department plots at ONGC Tilla, Anandanagar and Vijayanagar near Bishramganj,[11] the forests of North and South Kalamchoura, Anandapur and Ghatigarh, where the Sonamura police said the growers had encroached on forest land,[1] reserve forest at Dhanirampur[12] and rubber forest at Ramnagar in Bishramganj.[13] Police called the ground cleared in December 2025 and January 2026 "mountainous land".[2]
Climate
The district lies in the humid subtropical zone. Its average annual rainfall is 2,175 mm, of which 1,378 mm falls in the south-west monsoon from the second week of June to the fourth week of September and 210 mm in the north-east monsoon from October to December; January and February bring 29 mm.[14]: 2–3 At Sonamura the mean rainfall over 21 years between 1950 and 1973 was 2,424 mm, against 2,127 mm at Agartala.[8]: 133
History
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94 heard witnesses on cultivation in Hill Tippera, the princely state of Tripura. It found the cultivation to be "of the ruder sort, the seed of the wild plant being often used", and reported no trade in the drugs there beyond an insignificant import and some petty smuggling into British territory towards Bengal and Assam.[15][16]
Sepahijala District was formed from West Tripura District, out of the Sonamura and Bishalgarh subdivisions and the new Jampuijala subdivision. The state's Council of Ministers announced it in October 2011, to take effect on 21 January 2012.[17]
Before 2018, a Sepahijala farmer told a reporter in 2021, police raids seized small amounts of ganja but left the trade alone.[18] In March 2018, days after a new state government took office on a promise to make Tripura nasha mukta (free of addiction), the district administration, the state police, the Border Security Force, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the Narcotics Control Bureau raided homes across Sonamura subdivision. By October the subdivisional magistrate counted about 30,000 kg of cannabis recovered and 107 people arrested in the district.[3]
Demography
Of the district's 542,731 people, 266,521 live in Sonamura subdivision and 196,646 in Bishalgarh subdivision.[19] Many households live from rubber plantations.[4] Dhanirampur and Bijoynagar, two of the villages where ganja has been destroyed, are ADC villages, within the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council.[12][20]
Traditional cultivation
Police have found the seedlings raised in nursery beds in the forest. In August 2025 police destroyed about 200,000 saplings in 12 nursery plots in the forest of South Moheshpur at Katalia, and in August 2026 about 800,000 saplings in 27 seed beds at Dhanirampur, Bijoynagar and Batadola, with some 20 kg of seed and 200 kg of dry leaves.[21][20] In September 2026 they found 14 more nursery beds, holding about 140,000 saplings, at Mainamura, Anandapur, Ghatighar and Baga Lunga.[22] The reported drives against fields of young plants have fallen between November and February: about 1.2 million plants in one drive in November 2025, and some 3 million in ten days around the turn of 2026.[23][2]
Before the 2018 crackdown, one Sonamura grower raised 500 plants on half an acre of his family's land, spending about ₹50,000, mostly on fertiliser, manure and labour, and harvested some 250 kg. Plantations needed chemical fertiliser and large amounts of cow-dung manure, and labourers earned ₹300 to ₹400 a day on them, against ₹100 to ₹150 on rubber.[3] The harvest is dried and packed for traders: police have recovered dry ganja packed in plastic drums in the Dhanirampur forest, 386 kg in nine drums in July 2025 and 1,027 kg in 24 drums in September 2025.[24][12]
Trade
A Tripura police official said in January 2026 that the state's dry ganja is not consumed locally but smuggled to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh for the higher prices it fetches there; consignments are seized from trucks, small vehicles and passenger trains.[2] In July 2025 the Sonamura police put the price in Bihar at ₹20,000 a kilogram, against the ₹800 to ₹1,200 a kilogram a Sonamura grower had been paid in 2017.[24][3] The traders who bought the harvest are locally called "parties".[3]
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Enforcement
Eradication in Sepahijala is carried out jointly by the district police, the Tripura State Rifles, the Border Security Force, the Assam Rifles, the Central Reserve Police Force and forest officials, and increasingly with drones to find plots before a raid.[1] The operations are listed year by year at Tripura eradication campaigns (2020), (2023), (2024), (2025) and (2026).
In December 2023 the Assam Rifles burnt 25,000 to 30,000 plants on about 10 acres of forest land at Kalamchoura,[25] and on the first day of 2024 a joint force destroyed about 200,000 plants on 100 acres of forest-department land near Bishramganj, without arrests.[11] In July 2024 the Border Security Force destroyed 15,000 saplings in a nursery behind a house at Nirbhoypur and 50,000 plants on about half a hectare at Neuramura, near the border outpost of Salpokar.[26][27]
The drives grew in the 2025–26 season. On 18 November 2025 more than 500 personnel under the district superintendent of police destroyed about 1.2 million plants between eight in the morning and two in the afternoon.[23] On 7 December, at Ramnagar Puran Pagli Bari in Bishramganj, growers felled trees across the road to stop the force, and tribal women cultivators begged the officers to spare a crop on which their families depended; about 400,000 plants on 32 forest-department plots were destroyed.[13] Two operations on 30 December and 3 January destroyed over 2.3 million plants on 414 acres, and a third on 7 January about 600,000 young plants on 65 plots at Dhanpur, Induria, Kacchakhala and Dhanmura.[2] No arrests were made on 3 January, in what NE Now called the state's biggest single-day action against cannabis cultivation.[1]
Recent news
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Tripura: Over 19 lakh ganja plants worth Rs 100 crore destroyed in Sepahijala". NE Now. 5 January 2026. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Over 30 lakh ganja plants worth Rs 145 crore destroyed in Tripura in 10 days". Northeast Herald. 8 January 2026. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Saikia, Arunabh (26 October 2018). "In Tripura, a crackdown on cannabis cultivation leaves hundreds without livelihood". Scroll.in. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Sepahijala District Administration. "About District". Sepahijala District, Government of Tripura. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Sepahijala District Administration. "History". Sepahijala District, Government of Tripura. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Sepahijala District Administration. "Subdivision & Blocks". Sepahijala District, Government of Tripura. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Sepahijala District Administration. "Police". Sepahijala District, Government of Tripura. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Mazumder, S. (November 1984). The Geomorphology of Tripura (PhD thesis). Shillong: North-Eastern Hill University. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Sepahijala District Administration. "Forest". Sepahijala District, Government of Tripura. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Sepahijala District Administration. "Sepahijala WildLife Santuary". Sepahijala District, Government of Tripura. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 "Tripura: Police destroy 2 lakh cannabis saplings in Agartala". ANI. 2 January 2024. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 "1,027 Kgs of Cannabis Recovered from a Reserve Forest Area in Tripura". Northeast Live. 16 September 2025. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Rs 25 Crore Cannabis Plantation Wiped Out in Major Anti-Narcotics Raid in Tripura". Northeast Live. 7 December 2025. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Krishi Vigyan Kendra, West Tripura (ICAR Research Complex for NEH Region). Agriculture Contingency Plan for District: Sepahijala (PDF) (Report). ICAR Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IV, "Extent of cultivation, and its tendency to increase or decrease", paras. 96–100, pp. 37–39 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. VII, "Trade and movement of the hemp drugs", paras. 284–286, p. 108 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "Four new districts, six subdivisions for Tripura". Deccan Herald. PTI. 26 October 2011. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Panday, Chandan (28 February 2021). "In Tripura's war on weed, farmers are the biggest losers". EastMojo. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ Sepahijala District Administration. "Demography". Sepahijala District, Government of Tripura. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 20.0 20.1 "Destroyed Ganja Plants : Massive Anti-Drug Drive By Sepahijala District Police". Tripura Star News. 13 August 2026. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ "Tripura police destroy over 4.28 lakh ganja saplings in Sepahijala district crackdown". India Today NE. 1 September 2025. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ "Destroyed 14 Nos Ganja Nursery : Massive Anti-Drug Drive By Sepahijala District Police". Tripura Star News. 13 September 2026. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 23.0 23.1 Chakraborty, Tanmoy (18 November 2025). "12 lakh cannabis plants worth Rs 50 crore destroyed in Tripura; 500 personnel deployed in massive crackdown". India Today NE. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 "Dry Cannabis Worth Over Rs 1 Cr Seized in Two Separate Operations in Tripura". Northeast Live. 29 July 2025. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ "Assam Rifles destroy cannabis plantations worth Rs 1.5 crore in Tripura". ANI. 14 December 2023. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ "Border Security Force destroys 15,000 ganja saplings in joint operation in Tripura's Nirbhoypur". The Sentinel. 17 July 2024. Retrieved 17 October 2026.
- ↑ "Destruction Of Ganja Plantation And Apprehension Of Bangladeshi Nationals By BSF". Tripura Star News. 29 July 2024. Retrieved 17 October 2026.