Situated between the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos) and the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan), the two centers of greatest production and marketing of illicit opiates, it is curious that India is not known as a world-exporter of illicit opiates. Yes, there is "slippage" or "leakage" from the illicit, but until now (1998), the illicit products circulated within India.
Some say it is only a matter of time before an illicit export market develops, particularly because of transit routes developed during the 1980's. One impact of the Iran-Iraq war was the closure of the overland route for illicit narcotics from Pak-Afghan to Europe. As people and cargo from Pakistan were targetted for special searches in Western Europe and the US, the illicit merchandise transitted India. That traffic slowed dramatically as the overland passage re-opened.
What these web pages offer are a running account of, and pictures, of the licit opium industry in India. To see a map showing where peasants are licensed to grow the poppy somniferum, click here: Map.
Note that the growing areas in UP are what we would call part of the Gangetic Plain, and the regions in the other two states are fairly dry, fairly flat. Poppy may be grown in remote mountainous areas, but the highest yields come from production in good soils, well-fertilized, weeded, and tended.
wo government factories process the opium. The Ghazipur (UP) factory is about 150 years old; Neemuch (MP) was set up in the 1930's. The headquarters of the Industry is in Gwalior, which was a Native State known for its poppy production, and which was never part of British India. (Photo of Ghazipur factory)
Licit Production
| Peasants are licensed to grow a certain area in poppy; in the early 1990's the plots were standardized at 1/10 th a hectare. By 1997 the Narcotics Commissioner suggested granting a license for larger acreage to the highest producers. The staff of the Opium Department measure the fields, using a tape, shown here. Note that the peasant is standing in the row beween two fields. The fields are check-measured with staff drawn from other states and districts. Those peasants growing more than the allowable are struck off the opium rolls for future production, and the excess poppy is pulled up, plowed under, and destroyed. In some years when excess opium cultivation has been discovered, officers and staff in the Opium Department have been either reprimanded, brought up on charges, or dismissed. |
 Photo courtesy of the Central Bureau of Narcotics. |
 The blooming field of poppies is in the center-right, with alfalfa in lower right (pink sari drying on it); a grain crop is behind the woman, abutting the poppy field, while sugar cane is growing behind. Note the distance between the crop fields. (Back to q of fencing, or to text on fodder.) |
 Most poppies have a white bloom, but one red appeared in the field. A close-up of this blossom and field appears later. |
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Photo on left courtesy of the US DEA (Bombay), and on the right from the Central Bureau of Narcotics, Government of India. |
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Poppies are lanced in the afternoonand the latex is scraped off the next morning. Peasants hope for calm, dry days during lancing season. Rain washes the latex off the pod, while friction of pods in the wind rubs the latex off . Pods ripen (soften) at different times in the field. Each pod can be lanced from 4 to 7 times. The lancing takes a great deal of time and attention.
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On the left, a woman scrapes the pod; the close-up on the right shows the wide, curved blade with a rim of pink opium. Several pods can be scraped before the opium is placed into a container. |  |
These two shots were taken at the Rajasthan Agricultural College in Udaipur, which has a research program and test plots. |
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So many pods to cut and scrape! On the right, the opium collected is weighed on a daily basis before an officer of the Narcotics Dept. |
Photo from Narcotics Control Bureau  |
After the latex has been collected, all the peasants from an area take their opium to a weighment center. On the left, courtesy of the Central Bureau of Narcotics, are the peasants waiting their turn for weighment; their opium has been scraped into standard containers of known weight. One-tenth of a hectare produces small amounts of latex.
On the right are officials grading the opium by the traditional method in which the trained officer gauges the quality by feel. On the far right a new Trane device is being tested.
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Peasants wait their turn (left) for officers to test the opium for adulterants, below. On the right, workers carry a filled drum of opium latex. Photos courtesy of the NCB.  |
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Record-keeping is a chore that extends back to 1848. On the left is former Commissioner of Narcotics Kailash Sathi, with the pile of records (note the armed guards at his rear), then next step in record-keeping. On the right is the area where peasant accounts are calculated and payment is made for the opium. The latex is stored in red containers known in the US as milkcans. Photos at Neemuch weighment center, courtesy of CBN.
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The opium latex is transported under guard to the Opium and Alkaloid Factories. At left is the opium at 70% in the weighment center; on the right are trays of latex being dried using solar power to 90%. The 70% is the consistency of molasses; the 90% is the consistency of a firm bread dough. In the photo at right workers with paddles stir the latex to ensure uniform drying. The trays are moved inside at night; the trays as well as the red containers are padlocked, and the factory is guarded by federal security forces of another Ministry. Photos courtesy of the Central Bureau of Narcotics.
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Workers being frisked before leaving the factory. |
On the right a Factory chemist conducts tests on the Opium. Chemists test multiple cans of opium, and if there is any problem then make tests on individual cans. The product can be traced to specific villages but not to individuals. |
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The latex is sold to licensed pharmaceutical and/or chemical manufacturing firms such as Mallinckrodt and Johnson & Johnson, under rules established by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the International Narcotics Control Board, which require an extensive paper trail.
Limits on Indian industrial development in pharmaceuticals:
US law (as is the case with many countries) only permits raw opium imports. This ruling limits the expansion of the Indian alkaloid industry and ensures India remains a producer of the raw product.
Pharmaceutical firms cannot patent natural products and prefer to manufacture and sell chemical substitutes. Thus foreign firms have little reason to purchase or utilize natural opiates. They do because of their usefulness and safety.
In the Alkaloid Factory, morphine codeine and other alkaloids are produced for the pharmaceutical industry of India, and a few other countries. However, concerns about "leakage" to the illicit have resulted in restrictions on opiates by Indian pharmaceutical firms--even those owned and controlled by the Government of India. Doctors and other health care workers complain about the need for opiate preparations and the Indian ban on their use.
Since opium production is regulated by the Ministry of Finance, it is difficult to work out cordial relations on optimum and desirable use of opiate products with the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry running the Chemical Industry. It would require close coordination among all three to obtain action, and that doesn't exist. In this country which produces so much opium for the world, there is no testing of old or new opiate preparations for medical use or for market, and the use of opiates has declined while population has soared.
Control Measures in India
India makes more than a good-faith effort to control opiates. Comparing production figures for Indian licit yields with guestimates from other countries is enlightening. From the Drug Enforcement Administration, Office of Intelligence, comes this data for 1991, similar to yields in every other year. Remember yields in India are 35-60 kgs per ha, with peasants struck off cultivation rolls if they produce less than 34:
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Is there illicit cultivation in India--yes. Some is detected and destroyed; some will escape. All told, however, it is minor. Is there leakage to the illicit at the farm-gate, by cultivators? Yes. Yields within one state can vary by 1:3, which suggests some are slipping 1-2 kgs from what they collect. Is there leakage at the factory? The USG says no, but it would be less risky for smugglers to bribe guards and "raid the factory" to obtain 80-100 kgs of latex rather than collect 1-2 kgs from individual peasants. No one is going to claim, with a straight face, that although corruption is rampant in India, it doesn't exist in the narcotics industry! The yields, however, speak for themselves--highest in the world.
US Government Pressures:
The US government, with a US model of agriculture in mind, has pressured the Government of India (GOI) to mandate that poppy fields be fenced.
Remember that wood is a scarce commodity in India, and wooden fence poles would rot in the monsoon rains.
When one finds a fence, a close look shows the fence poles are cement. Neither woven wire nor barbed wire are readily available.
Land, being scarce in India, is plowed right up to the edge of the field, with a very narrow, often raised, strip of land between them. The raised lip, which can range from 6" to15", is important for irrigation; the raised strip provides a walk-way or bike-way for people and animals.To fence the fields would be to lose precious acreage--and for what goal?
The peasants would be the first to complain if the opium was being "stolen" from the fields. If someone wants opium, they are far more likely to steal it or buy it after the lancing. There is a lot of work involved in the next steps.
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The photo shows the nature of the problem: the peasant is standing between two plots. (Earlier the field was seen from a distance, with one red poppy blossoming. It's the same poppy. ) Look again at the initial photo of the woman standing in front of four different crops, and the peasant standing between plots as fields are measured. Indian peasants do not waste productive land.
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American officials also want India to stop producing with the opium latex method, and go to the "poppy straw" method used in Turkey and Australia. In the latter method, the entire poppy plant is cut, after the opium in the capsules have dried. The plant can be harvested with a combine (as in Australia), or the pods opened by hand and the poppyseeds removed (as in Turkey). Then the pods and stalks are sent into the factory to be washed with chemicals. The resulting mixture is a concentrate of poppy straw (CPS), with a higher percentage of morphine than the latex, and is one step from Heroin.
Opium latex has to be cooked repeatedly to produce morphine, then the morphine has to be converted to Heroin. That's a longer process, especially given the shortage of fuels (wood, cattle dung, fossil) for the process.
Chemically, the poppy straw no longer contains thebaine, which is the potent anti-opioid described earlier. India is currently the world's sole source of thebaine.
In India, after the pod is lanced and the opium latex removed, the pod is dried and then split to release poppyseeds. The poppyseed prices have been so high in recent years that peasants earn more from the seeds than they do from the latex.
What happens to the stem, stalk, residues?
 The elephant is carrying most of what was a luxuriously leafed tree; the leafy branches were cut to provide fodder. Photo taken in Ujjain. In the center, a peasant strikes a palm branch. He paused and posed on the right. (Photos taken adjacent to the poppy fields photographed earlier.) |
The palm leaves have thorns at their tips; he is beating them off so his bullocks can eat them. There is little alternative fodder. That little plot of alfalfa (see woman in field photo) won't feed 2 bullocks very long.  |
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The USG has also strongly recommended greater controls and study of usage of the chemical precursor to production of heroin. A few decades ago the US was the largest producer of acetic anhydride, the precursor, in the world; when limits were placed on production, new centers of precursor manufacture sprang up abroad. India is one of the producers, and there is evidence that Pakistan buys the precursors to turn Pak-Afghan opium into heroin.
Other material:
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Opium is grown in the three states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Note that the growing areas in UP are what we would call part of the Gangetic Plain, and the regions in the other two states are fairly dry, fairly flat. Poppy may be grown in remote mountainous areas, but the highest yields come from production in good soils, well-fertilized, weeded, and tended. Yields in India range from 40-60 kg per ha, which is 3-4 times higher than yield in Turkey. The US State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report routinely claims higher opium production in countries where the US has no effective on-ground presence which would permit data-gathering--such as Afghanistan which has been in civil war since 1979. It fails to provide data for illicit producers such as Pakistan where the US does have a presence. The DEA (Justice) estimates illicit yields in
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