Baroda restricts cannabis sales, transport and larger possession

Baroda’s cannabis controls took effect on 1 February 1892 under a notification issued the previous December. The translated text, reproduced for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, combines licensed sales, limits on larger possession and transport, enforcement powers and a medical exception.

A dated notification

The Baroda memorandum identifies Notification No. 10 of 10 December 1891 and reproduces it in English. Its final clause expressly sets commencement on 1 February 1892. The database uses that commencement date rather than the year in which the order was issued.

The source is a contemporary official translation preserved in the commission’s appendices. It is more specific than a later statement that Baroda adopted controls sometime in the 1890s, though the original-language notification has not been separately inspected here.

Licensed channels and possession

The rules limited unlicensed possession to one seer of forty tolas of ganja or its preparations, and four such seers of bhang or its preparations, with an exception for cultivators. Larger possession required permission.

Cultivators could sell their produce only to licensed dealers. Other sellers needed authorization from the Subha. The text also required licences for movement within the state in the circumstances it specified. These provisions organized a controlled supply system rather than prohibiting every person from growing or holding any cannabis.

Penalties and medical supply

The reproduced notification provided a fine of up to two hundred rupees or simple imprisonment up to three months for the listed offences, together with confiscation. It also assigned search and investigation powers to specified officers.

A separate clause preserved the right of medical practitioners, chemists, druggists and vendors of medicinal preparations to prepare, sell or supply the drugs for bona fide medical purposes. That exception is part of the legal account and prevents the controls being described accurately as a ban on every form of supply.

A monopoly with limits

The memorandum characterizes importation and sale as a state monopoly from February 1892. That describes the administration’s arrangement; it does not erase the text’s specific permissions, exceptions and distinctions between activities.

Recorded under India, this was a rule of the princely state of Baroda. It adds evidence of nineteenth-century cannabis regulation without implying a single law for all Indian territories. The event is unscored regional context, with its particular institutional and geographical scope retained.^[1][2]