I was reading in today's newspaper (DH) that there are roughly 3,00,000 persons in India's prisons. The average cost of housing and feeding a prisoner in roughly Rs 30,000 per year as per the newspaper article. This is not counting the cost associated with time spent by the police machinery to investigate, arrest and detain the individual as well as the time spent by the courts to conduct the trial and put the prisoner in jail. The additional cost that this adds will be the time spent by the various persons in the legal machinery who are involved in the process of incarcerating the individual translated into a portion of the salaries paid to each of them. I believe that considering these additional costs, roughly at least Rs 1,00,000 is closer to the actual cost to the state of arresting and imprisoning an individual in our jails for 1 year. Taking a rough estimate that approximately 40% of these prisoners are in jail for ganja related crimes, this makes about 1,20,000 prisoners. The cost to the system and hence to the tax payer of this exercise by the state of implementing ganja related legal controls is then approximately Rs 1,200 crores per annum.
If, on the other hand, ganja cultivation was recognised as agriculture (which is finally just what it is contrary to what different parties would like to say based on their flawed or dishonest perspectives), each of these 1,20,000 prisoners rotting away in jail could be (based on a very, very, conservative estimate) growing about 20 kgs of ganja per head per annum. This is saying maybe 10 plants per person in a year and you can see the immense potential that this number is hiding. If you conservatively value ganja at Rs 30,000 per kg we are talking of revenues of Rs 6,00,000 per person. If the state taxed this income at 20%, this would be a revenue of Rs 1,20,000 per person and a total revenue of Rs 1,440 crores per year for the state.
So economically we are talking about an absurd, outdated and prejudiced law that is costing the tax payer a loss of Rs 1,200 crores per annum (at a conservative estimate) when it should be making at least a revenue of Rs 1,440 crores per annum to the national exchequer (at a very, very conservative estimate). All this calculation is just based on the prison population of our country and not the 120 crore persons who currently inhabit India and of whom at least a few lakhs of persons would take up legal ganja cultivation as farmers if the hostile environment to this form of agriculture was removed. If you are thinking that this amount of ganja will not be consumed in this country, I am sure that many hundred times this amount of ganja is currently being produced and consumed locally and globally with the money going into the hands of criminals and unscrupulous persons. As for exporting it, this plant has the potential of possibly being our number one export one day given our beautiful indigenous varieties. Make in India will do much better environmentally, psychologically as well as economically making ganja rather than guns and cars for the world's elite. Could the CAG or whoever is responsible please look into this as soon as possible?
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