Traders from Tamil Nadu and Kerala lured the tribals of Vizag into ganja cultivation with clever devices like farm technology, leases, advance purchases, etc

Until 20 years ago, > ganja cultivation was not heard of in the Agency villages of Visakhapatnam district in Andhra Pradesh. With a heritage of podu cultivation, tribal farmers in the some of the more remote villages scratched about on the hill slopes to raise millets and coarse cereals and teetered on the edge of food security. Ganja cultivation as an alternative to conventional cropping was practised in the Lambada tandas of Warangal and Nalgonda districts in the then undivided Andhra Pradesh.

But then, around 2004, the Maoists retreated from Andhra Pradesh into denser foliage in Chhattisgarh and Orissa, leaving the Agency villages in Visakhapatnam in a power vacuum for a few years. Into this twilight zone stepped traders from Tamil Nadu, mainly from Salem, Dindigal and Theni districts. As with the Lambada tribals of Telangana, they found the tribals of the Agency hills easy to persuade to switch to ganja, a plant that needs little tending.

Without the support of logistics and a supply chain, the tribals might have found marijuana a useless crop to grow. But the shadow figures from down south offered not only a market but also support in the form of fertilisers, drip irrigation and diesel-powered generator sets. They also came with finances, leases and advance purchases.

Today, the Agency tracts exhibit the ironies of skewed development. > Agricultural facilities like drip irrigation have been adopted in ganja-growing villages like Darakonda but other hamlets continue as before, practising marginal sow-and-reap agriculture. The kind of farm support technology seen in the marijuana villages in Agency Visakhapatnam has not reached even some of the more prosperous plains villages.

Like all clever plainsmen who come to these hills, the tribals were won over with a pittance at first. The traders offered little sums to prospective ganja farmers that still were better returns than millets offered. It wasn’t until the Maoists filtered back into the hills that the marijuana traders began to cough up more. Today’s ganja growers in Darakonda make about about Rs. 60,000 per acre — big money, something that a farmer from the fertile tracts of the Godavari delta might hope to make from his lush paddy. In some places the adivasi farmers are paid on the basis of the number of surviving plants per acre at the time of harvest.

As per an estimate of the Prohibition and Excise Department of Andhra Pradesh, the yield per acre is about 10 bags of 30 kg each. The rate for the ‘Sheelavathi’ variety of marijuana, for which the Agency’s ‘grasslands’ have won some notoriety, could vary from Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 16,000 per kg at the endpoint of the marijuana value chain.

To the traders, this is cheap raw material with promise of manifold returns. Perched in their safe zones in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra or Delhi these paltry leases are peanuts compared to the profits they stand to make. Some of the traders have made themselves at home here, the inaccessible hills keeping them out of the reach of the law.

Some of the traders who moved in early have even married adivasi women and set up home. No wonder, 90 per cent of the households in some of these villages have Sun TV dish antennae.