Odisha's Adivasi Farmers Caught Between Bhang Law and Ganja Crackdowns

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Ajay Rout tends a hillside plot deep in one of southern Odisha's forested districts, roughly a thousand cannabis plants spread across terraced clearings that are hard to reach on foot and harder still for anyone with a badge to stumble onto uninvited. He is not a cartel operator. He is, by most accounts of how this economy works in the region, a subsistence farmer who found that rice and millet alone don't cover a household's needs in a place where the nearest paved road, bank branch, or produce market might be a day's walk away. Cannabis fills the gap.

What makes his situation strange, at least on paper, is that India has no problem at all with people consuming cannabis in a specific, culturally sanctioned form. Bhang lassi is sold openly during Holi in Rajasthan. Bhang thandai shops operate near temples in Varanasi with government-issued licenses. Yet the plant that produces bhang is, in nearly every practical sense, illegal to grow. That contradiction sits at the center of Odisha's cannabis economy, and nowhere is it more visible than in the tribal-dominated hill districts where the state's illicit cultivation is concentrated -- among the largest in the country, according to years of seizure data from Indian narcotics agencies.

Why Bhang Is Legal but Growing Cannabis Isn't

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The legal architecture here comes from the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985, and it draws a distinction that confuses a lot of people the first time they hear it. The NDPS Act specifically bans charas, the resin extracted from the plant, and ganja, defined as the flowering or fruiting tops of the cannabis plant. It does not ban seeds or leaves, unless those seeds and leaves are mixed with the banned flowering tops. That carve-out is the entire legal basis for bhang's survival in Indian culture -- bhang is traditionally made from leaves, so a drink made from leaf paste falls outside the definition of a controlled substance under the central law, which is why states can and do license its sale.

The Hill Districts Where Cannabis Still Grows Wild and Cultivated

From 2021-2023, Odisha's cannabis enforcement drive led to over 600 tonnes seized, 28,000 hectares of cultivation destroyed, and more than 8,500 traffickers arrested, highlighting an intensified crackdown ahead of the state's 2026 elimination goal.

Odisha's hill districts have become the country's most closely watched cannabis-producing region largely because the terrain works against enforcement in the same way it works against everything else -- roads, electricity, mobile signal. Six districts show up repeatedly in state and central narcotics reporting as active cultivation zones: Koraput, Malkangiri, Rayagada, Gajapati, Boudh, and Kandhamal, all sitting in the folded, forested hill country of southern and western Odisha. Older seizure records point to Deogarh, Sambalpur, and Nayagarh as historic centers of production as well, suggesting the geography of cultivation has shifted over decades rather than appeared overnight.

One Farmer's Hillside Plot and the Economics Behind It

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Picture the economics from the ground, not from a policy brief. A farmer like Ajay Rout is not abandoning rice or millet to grow cannabis full time -- in most documented cases, cannabis functions as a supplemental crop, planted on marginal hillside plots that wouldn't support much else, timed around the subsistence calendar rather than replacing it. A thousand plants sounds like a serious operation until you consider the plot sizes involved and the price a farmer actually receives, which is a fraction of what the crop eventually sells for once it moves through several layers of traffickers toward urban markets outside the state.

Inside the 2026 Nishamukta Abhiyan Crackdown

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The most recent and most visible enforcement push came under a nationwide campaign directed by India's Narcotics Control Bureau, called Nishamukta Abhiyan, which ran from June 26 to July 10, 2026. The drive's stated purpose was destruction of seized narcotic stock sitting in state custody, and Odisha's contribution to that tally was substantial: 78,600.68 kilograms of seized ganja were identified for destruction in the state during the special window.

The Case for Regulating Rather Than Only Destroying

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Set against all this enforcement activity is a quieter argument, made mostly by researchers, some tribal welfare advocates, and a handful of agricultural scientists, that Odisha is destroying a resource it has never seriously tried to regulate. The claim starts with the plant itself -- indigenous cannabis strains grown in the Odisha hills are described by proponents as having a dual-use character, valuable for both their seed and fiber qualities alongside whatever medicinal or recreational properties draw enforcement attention in the first place. Some advocates point to local seed varieties carrying higher Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acid content than commercial hemp seed sold in wellness markets, though this is a claim that would need independent agricultural testing to confirm rather than something to take on faith from any single source.

None of this is new, and that's really the point. Odisha has been running variations of the same seizure-and-destroy cycle for years -- burn the stockpile, arrest the traffickers, announce the tonnage, move to the next season -- without ever seriously addressing why a farmer in Kandhamal or Malkangiri turns to cannabis over any other crop in the first place. The livelihood alternatives on paper, channeled through the Odisha Livelihood Mission, MGNREGS, and agri-business convergence schemes, have existed since at least 2021, and there's no clear public accounting of how many families they've actually reached or whether cultivation has meaningfully declined as a result.

Meanwhile Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir have all built licensed medicinal cultivation programs under their own state rules, carving out a legal channel for the same plant Odisha treats purely as contraband. Odisha has made no move toward that model, which means every plant grown in its hill districts, whether by a subsistence farmer or an organized trafficking network, sits entirely outside the law, subject to the same raids and the same bonfires regardless of intent.

Changing that would take more than sympathy for farmers like Ajay Rout. It would require the state to rewrite its own NDPS rules the way Dehradun and Bhopal already have, and it would require enforcement agencies to accept that Koraput's ridgelines and Malkangiri's forest cover will never be fully mapped by drone or satellite. Until Odisha decides which of those two paths it actually wants, the destruction totals will keep climbing every monsoon, and so will the plantations behind them.