Jahan's claim is that India never banned hemp — it only ever banned part of the plant. The NDPS Act of 1985 defines cannabis as the flowering bud and the resin, leaving the leaf, the seed and the fibre outside the narcotic definition, and Sections 10 and 14 hand state governments the power to licence cultivation. BOHECO spent its first six months establishing that, then nine years compounding on it: a cultivation policy written with Uttarakhand and since replicated across six or seven states, cannabis land races collected with CSIR labs and bred into twenty-odd varieties now close to registration, and a deliberately unthreatening first product — let them wear it first — that became India's first hemp handloom label and a crisp white shirt that sold out in under two months against a six-month plan. The 2017-18 pivot is the harder argument: textiles were high-volume and low-margin on a supply chain that was not yet mature, so the company took state licences in Madhya Pradesh to make hemp-seed foods and cannabis-leaf ayurvedic medicines, and then chose to compete on evidence rather than atmosphere — animal toxicity studies, analytical certificates, four registered clinical trials in arthritis, eczema, post-COVID stress and IBS, and roughly thirty continuing-medical-education sessions for doctors. Growth has run 30 to 45 per cent a year, including through COVID, on revenue of about ₹3.5-3.6 crore in the last financial year and 90 to 100 stores across ten or eleven states. The stakes: a wellness segment Jahan sizes at eight to ten million dollars today against hundreds of millions of arthritis patients — and sixty-plus hemp companies now chasing the market BOHECO had to itself in 2013.
Worth your time if you are
Founders building inside a grey regulatory zone
D2C wellness brands that need clinical proof, not claims
Agri operators whose raw material is still wild-collected
Investors sizing India's medical cannabis market
Anyone who assumes hemp and getting high are the same thing
