Talk:Patkai Bum
Discussion page of Patkai Bum
More actions
Talk
Discussion for: Patkai Bum • View • Links • Related changes
Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.
Page scope
Patkai Bum is a Growing Area in the Indo-Burman Range growing region. It treats cannabis in the hills below the Patkai range on the Indian side, as mapped on Changlang District, Arunachal Pradesh: the cultivation reported there since 2000 and what the colonial excise record says of the Khampti and Singpho country. The district as an administrative unit belongs at Changlang District.
Data verification
Check the main page for the sources behind each statement. Discuss the area's extent, its sites and the news items that belong to it here.
Discussion
Why the area is on the map
- The Arunachal Times (25 February 2021, dateline Bordumsa, 24 February): poppy and cannabis plants "were grown in approximately five hectares of land in Dirak Pathar and Kumung Pathar villages in Bordumsa circle", Changlang district, and were destroyed by the district administration with the police and paramilitary forces. The report does not name the Patkai and gives no separate area for the cannabis.
- The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894, Vol. I, ch. IV, para. 102) expected the homestead cultivation of the Himalayan frontier to be found "in the lofty ranges towards the Hukong valley and the north of Burma, the country of the Khamptis and Singphos". This is the Commission's expectation, not a report of cultivation seen there.
- J. J. S. Driberg (Vol. IV, p. 533) names the Khamptis and Singphos in his survey of the hills, and after naming the tribes north of the valley says "In all these hills ganja is grown". Whether "all these hills" takes in the Khampti and Singpho country, which he names just before, is not clear from the passage.
- No source read reports cannabis grown or destroyed on the Assam side of the range (southern Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Charaideo); press searches there found only seizures of ganja in transit.
How the border is drawn
- The border is a proxy: Changlang District, from its OpenStreetMap administrative relation, about 5,000 km² (the district administration gives 4,662 km²). The district was part of Tirap until 1987; the 1980 Tirap gazetteer gives the Patkai mountain system as the district's eastern and southern heights, and the Changlang district administration says the Noa-Dihing rises in the Patkai range.
- The one modern report names a circle of the district, so the district is the unit. Bordumsa, where the 2021 plants were destroyed, is one of the district's flat circles, below the hills.
- Tirap and Longding districts, and Mon district of Nagaland, also lie along the range. Searches there found reports of opium poppy destroyed but none of cannabis, so they are left out. The Myanmar side of the range is not mapped.
Title
The area takes the name Patkai Bum. The sources read print the range as the "Patkai range" and "Patkai Hills" (Allen, Lakhimpur gazetteer, 1905), the "Patkai mountain system" (Tirap gazetteer, 1980), and "Patkoi" (Dalton, 1872; Driberg, 1894); these are given as other names.
Growing status
The status is Active: cannabis is reported grown and destroyed in the district in February 2021. No source read says that growing there has ended.
Sources not used
- A September 2026 report of the Arunachal Pradesh Narco Coordination Centre meeting (Northeast Today) quotes the chief secretary: 64.59 acres of cannabis destroyed in the state "so far". It names no district and no period, so it is not used here.
- The Kanjilal Flora of Assam (vol. IV, 1940) says Cannabis sativa is common throughout Assam and that bhang is made from wild plants; it names no locality in the Patkai.