Correspondent
IMPHAL, June 22
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he state of Tripura and other states of North East India are fulfilling 90% of raw bamboo sticks market demand in India, said Founder and Executive Director of South Asia Bamboo Foundation (SABF) Kamesh Salam in a memorandum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The sticks are produced at household level manually at community level. The Union government’s budget to reduce the import duty from 30% to 10% will hit artisans of North East hard as it will enable to import cheap bamboo sticks from Vietnam and China which will render lakhs of families jobless, the memorandum said.
Nearly 12 lakh people are directly or indirectly employed by the industry. Of the total incense stick (agarbatti) market of Rs 1,100 crore, the size of the organised market is about 40 per cent of the total market. About 2 billion sticks are burnt in a day.
Stating that because of faulty policy by Ministry of Commerce today India imports 250 truck load of bamboo sticks (agarbatti sticks) from Vietnam and China about via Chennai Port to feed the agarbatii industry in South India, he added. There are about 10,000 agarbatti manufacturing units in the country, including tiny, small and medium, besides another 200 well-established ones having over 50 branded agarbattis.Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been urged to make bamboo development a reality in India where China is currently leading the world market of 7.5 billion dollar market.
“This will help India to be a model of the world as bamboo is a key plant in today’s world as the fastest growing grass on earth,” said Kamesh.
Informing that the National Bamboo Mission has completed eight years of its existence now with little visibility on ground, Expert Member Apex Committee of National Bamboo Mission (NBM), Ministry of Agriculture and Coop, Government of India added the expected benefits of implementation of the Mission includes raising of 1.76 lakh hectare area under bamboo plantation over a period of 5 years, employment generation of 50.4 million mandays of work by plantation and 9.7 lakh mandays by raising bamboo nurseries both in public as well as private sector, besides many direct and indirect benefits.
He also urged the Prime Minister for effective regional and state policies on bamboo. “So far, 5 States of North east, i.e., Tripura, Assam, Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland have formulated their own policies on bamboo as on date,” he said. “Bamboo policies of other eastern states like Jharkhand and few states are also on anvil.”
Bamboo is the fastest growing and highest yielding renewable natural resource and different species occur in different parts of the country as India has 20% of world’s bamboo resources and the North East India has 52% of India’s bamboo resources.
The bamboo expert also admitted that some of the advantages of bamboo are: it can be used for reinforcement in place of mild steel; high strength to weight ratio and high specific load bearing capacity; requires less energy for production compared to material like steel, plastics, aluminum etc.; physical-mechanical properties of bamboo which grows to maturity in 4 to 5 years compares favorably with that of hardwood which requires 40 to 50 years to attain maturity; service life of bamboo can be enhanced considerably by providing suitable preservative treatment; Studies as in China, India has further established its versatility to be converted into panel and composite material possessing enhanced strength properties suitable for structural applications; like wood bamboo also possesses high residual strength to absorb shocks and impacts–this makes it highly suitable material for construction of houses to resist seismic and high wind forces; bamboo along with fast grown plantation species is very efficient in sequestering carbon and contributes to the reduction of green house effect.
In India, bamboo housing and constructions are not applicable to Indira Awas Yojna (IAY) houses of Rural Development, CPWD &PWD building codes. There is a huge prospect for bamboo housing in eco tourism, disaster relief housing, community buildings, rural sanitation related issues, low cost toilets etc, he added.
There is also need to have a similar institute on bamboo building like National Rural Roads Development Authority (NRRDA) for making rural roads under PMGSY schemes of Ministry of Rural Development to take up bamboo housing in uniform manner. Besides, national level technical and grassroots institutes like agriculture universities, ICAR institutes, ICFRE institutes , IIT, NIT, ITI , technical and informal colleges and schools should introduce bamboo related basic and advance courses on bamboo trade and technology.
