India, China and their contrasting bamboo stories

Dehra Dun, April 16 : From toothpicks to baskets, furniture to lacquer ware, mats to musical instruments, from toys to walking sticks, bamboo can make it all.

Bamboo’s natural elegance and easy workability makes it a choice material for handicrafts. That is why China manufactures over 8,000 items made of bamboo and earns $ 130 million dollars through exports, an official study shows.

Moreover, bamboo, the study says, is an ideal raw material for industries and about half of India’s bamboo consumption is for making paper pulp. Bamboo is also used in the production of rayon, activated charcoal, flooring and paneling products, and now serious efforts are being made to take the bamboo straight to rural areas of the country for the benefit of farmers in particular.

A headstart was made two years ago when the Badrinath temple committee began distributing ‘prasad’ in baskets of slick ringal (a bamboo specie) to generate income for the local Rudia community of Chamoli district.

Hesco, an NGO which is actively working in the Himalayan region, provided the technical know-how to the Rudias in this regard, according to Hesco director Anil P Joshi. The Forest Research Institute (FRI) has also come forward to contribute its expertise in the bamboo sector.

“We are ready to take our knowledge on bamboo to rural areas of India,” says Paramjit Singh, official spokesman of the FRI which has taken a lead role in starting training programmes exclusively for farmers.

Nearly 40 farmers from Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal have attended a six-day course in the FRI campus for setting up a modern bamboo nursery, raising seeds through vegetative methods and tissue cultures.

They were also shown technologies pertaining to long duration preservation and utilisation as well as methods to control diseases emanating from fungus and insects in order to safeguard the bamboo crop. “Till date, bamboo is synonymous with the northeast. What we are doing now is to take its advantanges to the rest of India,” says Mr Singh, also a scientist at the FRI.

The Uttaranchal government has also launched major efforts in making bamboo play a major role in the socio-economic life of the people of the hill state which is under 65% forest cover. According to chief secretary RS Tolia, “We should learn a lesson from China whose per unit production is 6 to 7% more than ours. China earns a lot of foreign exchange through export of bamboo.”

Replicating the Chinese experiment, the state government is now inviting...