Paderu (Andhra Pradesh): Here's the dope on a big business: Nearly 1,000 villages devote 10,000 acres to a plant used to make a product that commands a price of Rs 40,000 per kg in major urban markets. The plant is cannabis. The place is Paderu, Andhra Pradesh – India’s cannabis capital, the centre of eight mandals or tehsils that cultivate the plant.The narcotic cannabis, aka marijuana, is a psychoactive drug produced from the cannabis plant. It’s illegal in India, under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS), 1985, with convictions up to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment.In 2017, India’s drug enforcement authorities seized 3.5 lakh kg of cannabis. The amount that escaped the net, as is always the case with narcotics trade, is likely much larger.Next month — the cannabis growing season is September-January — narcotics cops are set to launch a major operation against cannabis cultivation in Paderu, deploying drones and mechanised cutters. Many law enforcement officials, who spoke to ET off the record, said the market incentive for selling cannabis is so strong that raids, even hi-tech ones backed by specialised teams, needn’t necessarily shut down operations, in Paderu or elsewhere.Malkangiri district of Odisha, near Paderu, is also in the big league of cannabis plant production. The Andhra-Odisha border belt is the prime source of raw material for India’s illegal cannabis market Other cannabis centres feeding the market are in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Nepal, according to the Narcotics Control Bureau.The economics of cannabis is remarkable: cannabis farmers earn about Rs 2 lakh from one acre, the per kg price is around Rs 2,000. Seelavathi is the most prized variety of cannabis sowed in this area, other varieties are Raja Hamsa and Kala Pathri.Middlemen who take the product out to be processed and sold often offer buy-back guarantees for crops and also supply inputs like fertilisers.So, just in Paderu, which devotes 10,000 acres to the plant, gross earnings are around Rs 200 crore. But this is only the income generated at the source. The Paderu belt supplies dried cannabis, also narcotic variant hashish or charas, to a large number of states: Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Haryana.By the time cannabis narcotics are sold in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai , Bengaluru, the street price is nearly Rs 40,000 per kg, according to estimates by the department of prohibition and excise (enforcement) Visakhapatnam district, which administers Paderu and the seven other cannabis-growing mandals nearby.Superintendent of Police of Visakhapatnam district (rural), Rahul Dev Sharma, told ET: “A number of cultivators are innocent tribal villagers being misguided by agents (middlemen). Last year, we did not book cultivators. But from this year onward, we will arrest repeat offenders.”Law enforcement though has a tough job. Last year, 249 villages were raided by enforcement agencies during cannabis season, and around 1.7 crore cannabis plants spread on 3,122 acres were destroyed, according to narcotics cops.SVVN Babji Rao, deputy commissioner of prohibition and excise (enforcement) of the district of Visakhapatnam and the man in-charge of last year’s anti-cannabis operations in the region, said that cops will move further inside this season. But he also said, “The problem is only increasing, as more local people have turned agents now.” Rao also said as many as 700 cannabis-growing villages could not be raided last year.Insufficient manpower, villages in areas virtually inaccessible for police forces, and the presence of Naxalites in the supply chain were among factors that worked against cops.Problems like these plus the powerful incentive from market forces mean commerce in India’s cannabis capital will likely be on a high for the foreseeable future.