REPORT BY DR. GEORGE WATT, M.B., C.M., C.I.E. 231
fibre is a regular
article of trade," and on his expectation that there may "
possibly" be
" tracts of the central tableland of India similar to the Godavery
district which could easily
grow the fibre-yielding forms of the plant." As regards the growth
of hemp fibre
in the Godavery district, there should be no difficulty in finding
out what the real fact is,
i.e., whether the " hemp" grown there is "sunn hemp," the
product of a plant of the pea
family named Crotalaria juncea or ganja hemp. If the latter,
then it might be worth
while to repeat, on a small scale, the Honourable Company's
experiment of growing from
European seed.
5. The
inner valleys of the Himalayas appear to
me to be so
handicapped
by the heavy
cost of carriage of their produce to a seaport as to make it
unlikely that hemp fibre grown
in them could compete successfully in the London market with fibre
grown on the continent
of Europe. Moreover, when one considers the number of
fibre-yielding plants which are
known to be indigenous to India, one rather doubts the expediency
of selecting for encourage-
ment the cultivation of a species of which even the fibre-yielding
race yields a narcotic so
potent as charas.
6. I regret that I
am unable to explain the precise meaning of Dr. Watt in the
sentence
alluded to by you and which ends as follows: " tracts of country
where fibre is produced, or
where bhang only can be grown as in regions of ganja or charas
production." From the context,
I gather that Dr. Watt suggests that excise regulations should be
relaxed in regions where
the Cannabis plant produces fibre, even although it may also
(as it in fact does) produce charas.