A Visit to Gazipur Opium Factory Snipped from http://bihartimes.com/newsbihar/2008/July/newsbihar16July5.html [I am quoting the text without making any correction. After all, it's the message that is important.] --- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India Until celebrated novelist Amitav Ghosh wrote it in his latest work of fiction, though liberally laced with history and sociology, Sea of Poppies---we, like him, too were quite unaware of the fact that it was Ghazipur opium factory which had financed British Raj in India as the single largest opium producers in the world, and more startlingly it continues to be the so. Digging deep into the quirky footnotes of Ghosh's novel contexts I decided to make a visit to the world's largest legitimate opium factory to gather more on it for its discerning readers. It was unwaveringly an eye-opener to get the facts on the factory and be not surprised. The opium factory of Ghazipur in Ghosh's novel now has become The Govt. Opium and Alkaloid Works and its one of the very few government enterprises with so much of a load of history, is running in absolute profit since its establishment in 1820. Spread across 52 acres on the banks of holy Ganga the factory now has a workforce of about 900 staffs. [snip] =========================