Jamuna chars

Jamuna chars
ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later
⛶
Hierarchy
Gene Pool	South Asian Gene Pool
Geography
Country	Bangladesh
Province/State	Rangpur Division, Mymensingh Division, Rajshahi Division, Dhaka Division
Districts	Kurigram District, Gaibandha District, Jamalpur District, Bogura District, Sirajganj District, Tangail District, Pabna District, Manikganj District, Rajbari District
Coordinates	24.60, 89.75
Landscape
Area	2,800 km²
Terrain	Approximately the braid belt of the Brahmaputra–Jamuna in Bangladesh: the channels, islands and sandbars between the banks, from the Indian border in Kurigram district to the Ganges confluence at Aricha
Growing history
Documentation
Appellations	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

The Jamuna chars are a landrace cannabis growing area on the chars, the river islands and sandbars, of the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, from where the river enters the country in Kurigram district to its meeting with the Ganges near Aricha. Below Bahadurabad the river's main stream is called the Jamuna. Upstream in Assam the river's chars form the Brahmaputra chars growing area. Police seized cannabis grown on remote chars of the Jamuna in Bogura district in 2022 and in Jamalpur district in 2024.

Geography

The Brahmaputra enters Bangladesh through Kurigram district, at the border of the Kurigram Sadar and Ulipur upazilas. At Bahadurabad, in Dewanganj upazila of Jamalpur district, the Old Brahmaputra leaves the main stream and runs south-east; between Bahadurabad and Aricha the main stream is the Jamuna, while the Bangladesh Water Development Board calls the whole stretch the Brahmaputra–Jamuna. In Bangladesh it is about 276 km long, of which the Jamuna is 205 km; above Bahadurabad the main stream is still the Brahmaputra. The river is 3 to 20 km wide, about 10 km on average, and braids into channels of many sizes. Through most of its course in the country it is studded with chars, many of them under water in the rainy season.

Some chars are islands in the river, surrounded by water all year; others are joined to the bank under normal flow. On the Jamuna the two kinds cover about the same area. A Landsat image of the 1992 dry season showed 56 large island chars in the Jamuna, each longer than 3.5 km, and 226 smaller ones between 0.35 and 3.5 km long. Between 1973 and 2000 chars appeared consistently in the reaches opposite the Old Brahmaputra offtake, north and east of Sirajganj, and just above the confluence with the Ganges. Over the same period more than 99 per cent of the land within the Jamuna's banks was char at one time or another; about three-quarters of the chars lasted between one and nine years, and about one in ten lasted 18 years or more.

In 1992 the Jamuna held about 100,000 ha of chars, against 75,000 ha on all the other rivers of Bangladesh together. In 1993 about 65 per cent of the country's char population of some 631,000 lived on Jamuna chars. In the upper reach of the river, newly built-up soils are mostly coarse sand and less suited to farming. Of the roughly 729,000 people displaced by riverbank erosion in Bangladesh between 1981 and 1993, more than half were displaced along the Jamuna.

Cultivation

In December 2022 the police in Sariakandi upazila of Bogura district seized a cannabis plant weighing 40 kg from the yard of a farmer of Shankarpur village, on a remote char of the Jamuna, who had planted it two years before. He was arrested and a case was filed under the narcotics control law. On 21 November 2024 the police in Islampur upazila of Jamalpur district seized a cannabis garden about 10 feet tall, some 25 kg of cannabis, from the yard of a man on the remote char of Kathma Krishnanagar, in Noarpara union; he fled on seeing the police, and a case was filed.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No news items are recorded for the Jamuna chars yet.

See also

• Brahmaputra chars
• Ganja Mahal
• Chittagong Hill Tracts