Cannabis mafias cultivate ganja on unused government land in Odisha

Some grown-ups use big empty pieces of land in faraway, hard-to-reach places in a state called Odisha to secretly grow a plant called cannabis, which is used to make an illegal drug called ganja.

The government owns some of this land, but nobody was using it, so the bad people planted their crops there.

These bad people are sometimes called the cannabis mafia.

The police in Odisha found these secret farms and destroyed them.

During the 2025-26 crop season, they cleared away the illegal cannabis plants on 36,508 acres of land, which is a very big area.

Out of that, 6,632 acres were land owned by the government.

This happened in six districts of Odisha: Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Kandhamal, Boudh and Gajapati.

Now, the government is asking its officers to keep watching these places so the bad people do not plant cannabis there again.