Talk:Angul
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Angul treats the cannabis growing area of Angul District in the Garhjat growing region: the ganja grown on homestead land in the Angul district and the neighbouring Tributary States in the 1890s, and the fields on forest land under the Handapa and Thakurgarh police stations since at least 2014. The district as an administrative unit is treated at Angul District.
Data verification
Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Why the area is mapped
- The 1890s. The Hemp Drugs Commission's report (Vol. I, para. 96) quotes the Commissioner's figure of 1,000 consumers "in the Angul State alone" who all grew ganja. Angul's Khas Tahsildar, N. C. Naik (Vol. IV, witness 73), and its District Officer, N. Das (witness 34), describe homestead growing, a few plants at a time.
- Since 2000. The Comptroller and Auditor General's audit of 2018 (para. 3.4.9) names Angul among the eight Odisha districts where cultivation continued from 2014–15 to 2016–17. The Director General of Police reported 851 acres destroyed in Angul in 2017–18 (OrissaPOST, 21 January 2018). OrissaPOST reported the fields under the Handapa and Thakurgarh police stations, with yearly destruction figures for 2014 to 2019 (26 November 2020).
Growing status
The status is Active: cultivation is reported in every year from 2014 to 2020. No source read gives a first year for the growing. The earliest mention for Angul itself is Naik's account of a prohibition ordered "seven or eight years ago".
How the border is drawn
- The border is Angul District in OpenStreetMap (administrative relation 1984462), simplified, about 6,380 km². The present district holds the Angul district of the 1890s together with the former Talcher, Athmallik and Pal Lahara States.
- The Handapa and Thakurgarh fields lie inside it: the officials OrissaPOST quotes on them are the excise inspector and sub-collector of Athmallik.
- The 1895 evidence of the Maharaja of Athmallik is used because his former State is now part of the district.
- The map point (20.99, 84.90) is the centre of the district; the border is not drawn from it.
Sources
- Hemp Drugs Commission. Vol. IV pp. 82 (Das) and 209 (Naik) were read on the page image; Naik's oral evidence (p. 210) in the OCR text. The heading on p. 209 reads "Naik"; the OCR misreads it as "Nat". Cooke's evidence (p. 20) says that Mr Metcalfe was his predecessor as Commissioner. The 1895 volume, p. 133, was read on the page image.
- Press. Each article cited was read in full. The yearly plant counts are the figures OrissaPOST gives "according to information available"; acreages and plant counts are those of the police or officials quoted.
Where the sources disagree
- How common the plant was. The Commissioner's report quoted by the Commission says all 1,000 consumers in Angul grew ganja; Naik found the plant in perhaps a third of the villages, and there only in certain houses, and saw "not more than ten or twelve" consumers a year at headquarters. The Commission (para. 96) reads both as one kind of homestead growing. The Commissioner's report is not named or dated in the Commission's text.
- When the prohibition ran. Naik dates it only relatively: ordered "seven or eight years ago" and repealed "three or four years ago", in his oral evidence to the Commission. The article keeps his wording.
- Decline or not. The Director General of Police's statement of January 2018 gives both 851 acres destroyed in Angul in 2017–18 and "a sharp decline" in cultivation there; the 2020 report gives falling yearly counts after 2016 and a local activist's view that cultivation was decreasing. The article gives each as its source's.