Talk:Odisha ganja trade

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Page scope

Odisha ganja trade treats the movement of ganja out of the hill districts of Odisha and the adjoining agency country of Andhra Pradesh: the Garhjat ganja carried into the Orissa districts and the Central Provinces from the 1870s to the 1890s, the hill ganja of the Madras Agency tracts in the same years, and the trade since 2010 as the Narcotics Control Bureau, the governments of India, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, and the press describe it. The product and its excise history belong to Garhjat ganja; where the plant is grown to Garhjat, Eastern Ghats and their growing-area pages; the trade inside West Bengal to Cannabis trade in West Bengal; the Kerala trade name to Idukki Gold. Modern routes are described at the level of state, district or city that the cited reports use.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Name

No source gives the trade a name of its own. The Narcotics Control Bureau and the police call the main source area the "Andhra–Odisha border"; that name covers only the southern hills and leaves out the Garhjat, which supplied the trade in the 19th century and still grows the crop. The title names the state and the product.

Sources

Colonial documents. The report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894), chapters VII and XVII; the Bengal, Central Provinces and Madras memoranda in volume III; the evidence of Bengal witnesses in volume IV and of Central Provinces and Madras witnesses in volume VI; the House of Commons return of 1893, which prints the Board of Revenue's report of 1871; and the Government of India's resolution of 1895. Chattopadhyaya's Ganja Matters (2026) for the place of Garhjat ganja in colonial excise.
Agency reports. The Narcotics Control Bureau's annual reports for 2014 to 2017; its statements of 2020 and its report for 2021 as carried by the press; the International Narcotics Control Board's report for 2022; the Sri Lankan National Dangerous Drugs Control Board's statistics for 2021.
Government figures through the press. The Ministry of Home Affairs' written answer in the Lok Sabha (2026), the Odisha law minister's written answer in the state assembly (December 2025) and the Odisha Police's statement of July 2026 are cited from the newspapers that reported them.
Press. Reporting from Onmanorama (2016), OdishaBytes (2021), The News Minute (2017, 2020, 2021), The Tribune (2021), Al Jazeera (2025), ETV Bharat, the Deccan Chronicle, OrissaPOST and News 1st (Colombo). Figures from the police are attributed to the police.
Scholarship. Das (2019) on drug trafficking as a security threat. No study of the trade as a whole is cited.

Where the sources disagree

Sri Lanka. In December 2025 officials quoted by News 1st (Colombo) called a case of ganja from the Andhra–Odisha border reaching Sri Lanka through Tamil Nadu the first known case. The Narcotics Control Bureau said in 2020 that ganja from the region was smuggled to Sri Lanka, and Telangana police described an Andhra Pradesh to Sri Lanka group in January 2020.
National seizures for 2021. The Narcotics Control Bureau's report, as carried by ETV Bharat, gives 749,761 kg of ganja; the International Narcotics Control Board, citing the bureau, gives 675,631 kg of cannabis.
Odisha's figures. The Ministry of Home Affairs' series (cannabis-based drugs seized in Odisha, 2020 to November 2025), the state law minister's five-year figures and the Odisha Police's figures for July 2024 to March 2026 are separate series with different periods and agencies, and are not added together.
The Maoists. The Odisha Police (2015), the Narcotics Control Bureau (2020) and Das (2019) link the trade to the Maoist insurgency; a former member of the Maoists' central committee (2021) and a Maoist leader's letter of the same year deny it or turn the charge on the police.

Infobox

Origin is the two growing regions the cited sources name, Garhjat and the Eastern Ghats. Destination is Puri and Cuttack for the 19th-century trade, and West Bengal, Delhi, Mumbai, Idukki and Sri Lanka for the modern one. Other destinations named in the article (Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Hyderabad, the Central Provinces) are left out of the infobox.
Period starts in 1871, the date of the Board of Revenue's report on the import of Garhjat ganja into Puri under pass. The trade is still in use, so there is no end year.
Legal status is Changed over time: the import was licensed and taxed in the 1870s, prohibited from 1882 to 1892, allowed again under pass from 1892, and is illegal today.
Route type is Mixed: overland within India, by sea to Sri Lanka.
Scale is the Ministry of Home Affairs' share of national seizures; it measures enforcement, not the size of the trade. The Narcotics Control Bureau gives no estimate of cultivation or production.

Georeferencing

Each town on the route is given a point where two gazetteers, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, agree to within about 2 km. Points are entered to two decimal places and mark the town.

Puri: 19.81, 85.83. Wikidata 19.800, 85.817; OpenStreetMap 19.808, 85.825; 1.2 km apart.
Cuttack: 20.47, 85.88. Wikidata 20.450, 85.867; OpenStreetMap 20.469, 85.879; 2.4 km apart.
Delhi: 28.67, 77.22. Wikidata 28.667, 77.217; OpenStreetMap 28.666, 77.217; under 0.1 km apart.

Mumbai is given without a point: Wikidata (19.076, 72.877) and OpenStreetMap (19.055, 72.869) are 2.5 km apart. Also given without a point: Garhjat and the Eastern Ghats, which are regions; West Bengal and Idukki, a state and a district; and Sri Lanka, a country. None of these is drawn on the map. Lines between the points are schematic and do not follow the roads. Éloise 06:36, 31 October 2026 (+07)

Open points

The Narcotics Control Bureau's annual reports for 2018 to 2020 are scanned images; their state-wise figures for those years are not in the article.
The modern trade's own history before 2010 (when ganja from the Odisha hills first reached distant markets) is not dated by any cited source.