1985The law draws a line almost nobody reads. The NDPS Act defines cannabis as the flowering bud and the resin, which leaves the leaf, the seed and the fibre outside the narcotic definition, and Sections 10 and 14 hand state governments the power to licence cultivation for industrial and medical use.
2010-11Seven students notice the one thing that never changes. Doing solar electrification across Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Maharashtra, they found custom, culture and language changed from village to village while cannabis grew wild in all of them. A road trip through west Australia sharpened it: town after town in decline until Margaret River, prosperous on wine and on hemp, fibre in the surfboards, seed in the salads, bud in the medicine. They graduated in 2011.
2013The first six months go on reading the Act. BOHECO starts by asking whether the business is even legal, works through the NDPS Act and requests meetings with the central ministries. It was the only hemp company in India at the time. Uttarakhand was the first state helped to write a cultivation policy for fibre and seed, and six or seven have followed. Between 2012 and 2014 the founders collected cannabis land races from across the country with government science institutes and cross-bred them into twenty to twenty-five varieties, now 98 to 99 percent of the way to registration, so that farmers would have something to sow once policy existed.
2013-16Let them wear it first. Anything you consume was the riskiest place to start, so they entered at textiles. Twenty-five to fifty women artisans in rural Uttarakhand, after the floods, collected and retted fibre by hand into handloom cloth, which became B Label Handloom. A prototype crisp white hemp shirt given six months to sell cleared in under two. Kurtas and bundis cut to the size of chief ministers and MPs turned Parliament into a channel, and when one member raised hemp textiles on the floor of the Lok Sabha, ten from other parties came asking for their own. Artisans had been separating fibre with their teeth for want of machinery, which cost them the teeth and the fibre quality both.
2017Eight months of polite follow-up, then three hours. An XPRIZE launch event at what was then the Blue Frog in Lower Parel put Ratan Tata in the front row beside Peter Diamandis. Jahan introduced himself, took the contact, and followed up every month for eight months to reach the calendar. Told to expect the advisers, they walked in past Tata's dog and found the meeting was with Tata himself, who gave them three hours, a personal investment and a Tata Trusts research grant. The same window brought the CSIR partnership and a government plant breeder as the company's first employee.
2017-18Shirts give way to prescriptions. Textiles were high volume and low margin on a supply chain that was not mature, so BOHECO took Madhya Pradesh licences to manufacture hemp seed as food and as ayurvedic proprietary medicine, and to make cannabis-leaf formulations. India, China and Thailand opened traditional-medicine pathways for the leaf and the seed inside the same window. Revenue at that point was about a crore.
2020-21The second storm was mental health. Growth stayed in its 30 to 45 percent band through the pandemic while comparable D2C wellness brands slowed, as insomnia, anxiety and clinics people could not reach pushed customers towards the stress formulations.
Today₹3.5 to 3.6 crore last financial year, and 70 percent of it wellness. Ninety to a hundred stores across ten or eleven states, prescription formulations reaching doctors across some 50 to 55 indication areas, and four registered clinical trials in arthritis, eczema, post-COVID stress and IBS, with animal toxicity studies and analytical certificates behind them. A two million dollar round went into the team, the trials and medical-grade cultivation rather than founder salaries, which stay nominal and bound to KPIs. Where BOHECO was the only hemp company in 2013, there are now more than sixty, against a team of 30 to 35.
Next yearA couple of million dollars, and a market that has to be built. Growth is planned at 35 to 45 percent on last year, but the larger number is the segment itself: Indian hemp wellness is worth eight to ten million dollars today, and Jahan wants it grown towards four or five hundred million, against hundreds of millions of arthritis patients and millions of people using the illicit version because they cannot get a medical one.
