Working on a tip-off, the Rajkot district police in Gujarat Thursday stumbled upon a harvest of Cannabis sativa, its palm-shaped compound leaves distinct from the slender green wheat stalks it shared space with, in the fields of Moti Khilori village of Gondal taluka. Weighing almost 21.3 kg, the plants found in the agricultural land belonging to farmer Nirmal Natha Der, 35, were valued at Rs 10.65 lakh. Der was booked under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.
This was the latest in the series of police crackdowns this month in which they seized cannabis valued at over Rs 2 crore – growing in cotton, pigeon pea (tuar) and wheat fields in Rajkot – prompting the use of high-resolution drone cameras for surveillance besides human intelligence.
Hetal Patel, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Rajkot City Zone 1, watches a screen carefully as it shows live feed from drones flying in a grid pattern over the farmlands in villages, trying to locate if anyone was trying to grow Cannabis sativa, which is used to produce ganja, camouflaged amidst crops. The flying cameras went over Bedla village, Gundala, Barvan…as the police team marked them ‘clear’.
Police teams across Saurashtra are currently on the lookout for cannabis cultivation as these plants, sown during the monsoon, are now ready for harvest. Deemed illegal under the NDPS Act, the plants must be seized and destroyed.
Speaking on the latest seizure, an officer from the Special Operations Group (SOG) of Rajkot Rural Police said, “Ganja cultivation in Rural Rajkot is concentrated around the Jasdan and Vinchhiya areas. In this particular case, we found the illegal plants, ranging from 2.5 feet to 8 feet in height, in a wheat field. It was in plain sight and was growing on one side of the farm.”
Simran Bharadwaj, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ACP), said, “Some farmers may not know what they are getting into, and grow it as a cash crop, but others are well aware of the law and still choose to grow cannabis in their fields.”
But not all illegal “weed” farmers make it as easy for the police as the one in Moti Khilori. Here, the plants, with their distinctive leaf pattern, had grown up to 1.5 times the height of an average individual and were clearly visible to anyone, being on the edges of a wheat field.
Fatehsingh Pargi, Police Inspector, Rajkot Rural SOG, said this was literally the first case in which cannabis was found growing in the wheat field. “In most cases, seasoned farmers grow it within fields of cotton and pigeon pea because these plants can grow up to 10 feet tall, thus effectively hiding the illegal crop grown in patches within these large fields often measuring 10 bighas (6.25 acres/2.5 hectare) or more,” he added. The cannabis plant can grow to prodigious proportions, up to 10-12 feet, at maturity.
On December 13, the Rajkot City police seized a massive 223 kg of contraband, worth Rs 1.11 crore, as standing crop besides harvested cannabis in Aniyala village just ahead of Aji Dam. Officials said they found 64 full-grown plants and 60.29 kg of product hidden in a pigeon pea farm.
AB Jadeja, Inspector, Aji Dam police station, said the cannabis was grown in a patch in the middle of the farm. “Some of it had already been harvested and was drying in the sun. The farm owner had been engaged in growing cannabis for the last one and a half years, and he had earlier sold about 4-5 kg of finished product in the neighbouring Surendranagar district. He said he did it because he had fallen into debt and had been told that ganja was a quick cash crop.”
Similarly, on December 2, a State Monitoring Cell (SMC) team led by Inspector G R Rabari, booked Ajitsinh Jiva Barad of Nani Vavdi village in Botad’s Ranpur taluka under several sections of the NDPS Act after finding 93 cannabis plants, weighing in over 198 kg and valued at Rs 99.09 lakh, in his cotton farm.
Local police officers say that such illegal cultivations are few and far in between in often inaccessible areas deep in the rural heartland. Officers who don’t agree with the drone approach say that human intelligence, through informants, still remains the best method to detect cannabis cultivation.
However, drones are helpful to pinpoint the location of these plants within large fields to initiate a raid. M G Jadeja, a Police Inspector who is with the SOG in Botad, said they had done this to locate a field of cannabis in Sangarpur village, also in Ranpur taluka. “We had seized 130 plants from an ashram there. The accused had confidently grown only ganja in neat rows on the premises which was easily visible from the drone because there were no other plants to hide them.”
However, since the seizure was done in August this year, the plants were still small and so the value of the seizure is also less. If they had been caught at full maturity, the value of the ganja would have crossed Rs 1.5 crore.
Perhaps the single largest cannabis cultivation seizure of the year in Gujarat took place in Sayla, Surendranagar, on November 25, when the SOG found a whopping 180 plants weighing 560 kg (half a tonne) and valued at Rs2.79 crore.
Police Inspector B H Singhrakhya of the SOG in Surendranagar told The Indian Express that the accused in this case had grown ganja intermittently on his 12-bigha cotton field. “He said he would take this risk every two-three years for quick cash. Additionally, the cannabis plants were not clustered in one place but were planted as one or two per row of 100 cotton plants and made up around 5 per cent of the total cultivation on the (7.5-acre) farm,” the inspector said.
An informant’s tip had led to the seizure. The police had also tried flying a drone overhead but were unable to see anything out of the ordinary. However, when they raided the field, officers saw that the tallest cannabis plants had been tied down so they didn’t poke above the cotton plants.
This is a countermeasure to hide from drones because cannabis is often taller than the other plants like cotton, sugarcane or tuar. So the farmers bend the plants and tie them downwards so they aren’t spotted.
While police commissionerates in big cities have their own drones, smaller districts have to share one with other districts in their police range, making availability a problem. Local police sidestep this issue by using private drones requisitioned for the purpose. But often, these are not very useful after dark due to the lack of night vision technology.
That is exactly what happened in Amreli on November 16, when the SOG there seized 45 plants, weighing 155.86 kg and valued at Rs77.93 lakh, from a cotton field in Kerala village of Lathi taluka, about 26 km from the district headquarters.
Inspector R D Chaudhari told The Indian Express, “The ganja was grown in a cotton field of 10 bighas. We did the search on the basis of information. We tried identifying it with a drone, but it had become dark, so it was not possible to positively identify these plants. Further, since the illegal plants were 10-feet-tall, the accused had tied them down to camouflage them and make them harder to detect.”
Since the end of October 2025, the value of drug seizures in India has gone up, not because of the number of raids but due to a revision in the “estimated street value” of these products by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB). The impact on seizures of cannabis and its finished products, like ganja and marijuana, is drastic.
According to a notification dated October 24, seen by The Indian Express and forwarded to the Gujarat Police by Dr K L N Rao, DGP, Criminal Investigation Department (Crime), ganja is now valued at Rs 50,000 per kilogram. This is a five-fold increase from the earlier value of Rs 10,000 per kg, confirmed police officers.
