In 2024 a province began asking a different question about the same plant. Before the year was out, the federal government did too.

Karnali, Nepal's poorest, most remote, most depopulated province, announced a pilot framework for industrial hemp cultivation. The framing was careful. The plant was hemp. The THC content was below 0.3 percent. The end uses were fibre, seed, oil, and grain. None of it was for smoking. None of it competed with charas. None of it touched the Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act.

The economic case was straightforward. Karnali's mid-hills are some of the best hemp-growing land in the world. The crop grows well at altitude, requires no inputs, and has a deep domestic market in textiles, food, and construction. The Kathmandu Post estimated provincial GDP uplift at four percent within five years if the pilot scaled. The Asian Development Bank projected substantially more.

Then, in May 2024, the question moved from province to nation. Finance Minister Barsaman Pun, presenting the budget for the 2024/25 fiscal year, announced that the government would make legal arrangements for the commercial cultivation and consumption of cannabis for medicinal purposes. The line was short, the shift was large. For the first time since 1973, a Nepali government had committed, on the record, to bringing the plant back into the law.

The provinces were already moving, and in 2026 one of them broke through. Gandaki, under Chief Minister Surendra Raj Pandey, moved a provincial bill to legalize cultivation strictly for medicinal and industrial purposes. On 9 July 2026 the Gandaki Provincial Assembly passed the Bill to Regulate and Manage Cannabis Cultivation for Medical and Industrial Purposes, 2026, unanimously, with a THC ceiling of 0.3 percent for industrial use. Gandaki became the first Nepali province to pass such a law. A second province is following the same path. Both stayed deliberately inside the hemp-and-medicine lane, leaving the recreational question untouched.

The cultural argument is louder. The hill farmers who have grown the plant for generations, under prohibition, under pressure, under the constant threat of confiscation, are being told, for the first time, that their crop is legal again. The same hands. The same slope. A different line in the law.

The national government has not yet changed the underlying federal act. The 1976 statute still classifies cannabis as a narcotic, and at the centre industrial hemp sits in a grey zone, technically permissible but legally ambiguous, defined by content rather than plant. The draft Cannabis (Regulation and Control) Act, 2025, and the related Bill to Regulate and Manage Cannabis Cultivation 2076 B.S. (under which farmers would obtain a license from their local government), would resolve the ambiguity at the federal level. Neither has yet been passed into federal law. The provinces have stopped waiting: Gandaki has already legislated.

Until the federal act changes, the revival is a commitment, a patchwork of pilots, and one provincial law that puts a federal-provincial fault line on the table. Karnali will grow. Gandaki has legislated. The central hills will watch. The conversation, for the first time in fifty years, will not be about whether the plant is allowed but what it is allowed to be.