Berar requires licences to cultivate ganja and bhang

Berar introduced a licence requirement for cultivating ganja and bhang on 1 April 1875. The rules applied in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts, administered by British officials. They restricted who could grow the crop while retaining a legal route to cultivation.

Notification and commencement

The Berar memorandum submitted to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission identifies rules issued in 1874 and brought into force the following April. Its reference names Notification No. 55 of 5 August 1874.

Keeping these dates separate avoids turning the notification year into the commencement year. The account records the practical licensing system in the 1890s and looks back to its introduction; the original notification itself has not been separately inspected for this article.

Permission to grow

A cultivator needed a licence from the Deputy Commissioner. The document was written on stamp paper costing eight rupees, supplied by the cultivator, regardless of the area cultivated.

The rule therefore imposed a flat charge rather than a fee increasing with acreage. It was also a prohibition of unlicensed cultivation, rather than an order abolishing all cultivation. Describing every restrictive cannabis rule as a complete ban would lose that distinction.

Destruction and penalties

Village officers had to report unlicensed growing. Deputy Commissioners could order the destruction of unauthorized crops and spontaneously growing plants. Unlicensed cultivators were liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred rupees per offence.

Half of the fines actually realized could be paid to informants. That created an enforcement incentive in addition to the duties assigned to local officers. The memorandum supplies the rule and the administration’s account; it does not independently measure every instance of compliance or crop destruction.

Regional regulation over time

The 1884 revision replaced the flat charge with a fee based on acreage. The 1897 law, effective in 1898 belongs to a later phase of control and should not be read back into the original rules.

The record is linked to India as regional historical context. It documents an early cultivation restriction in Berar without implying that identical rules applied throughout the subcontinent. No national score is inferred from this local administrative system, whose scope differed from both other provinces and the later Indian state.^[1]