A family's conviction. Nearly a decade of advocacy. And now, a renewed platform to build the network and policy environment India's hemp sector needs.
In the early 2010s, a young Gurugram entrepreneur and yoga instructor named Shantanu Mishra was travelling in Europe. He came across the extraordinary industrial potential of hemp — a plant India had cultivated for millennia and then largely abandoned due to policy confusion.
He returned to India with a mission. In 2016, together with his mother Mrs. Padma Mishra, he founded the Indian Hemp Association — with a simple but audacious goal: to make India a global leader in industrial hemp.
What began as advocacy for farmers became something far larger — a deep-tech vision spanning nanotechnology, graphene production, green hydrogen, bio-ammonia, and biodiesel. Today IHA's work reaches across all seven of these pillars, from established industrial hemp to emerging deep-tech directions it is actively developing.