Grand Naine, the first banana commercial tissue culture plant variety released by Haryana horticulture department for cultivation in Haryana to give a major fillip to the production of the banana crop on Friday .
While stating this, the agriculture minister, Harmohinder Singh Chatha said the Haryana horticulture department had forayed into the field of commercial tissue culture plants and had started the first commercial crop of banana variety Grand Naine through plant tissue culture, a practice to propagate plants under sterile conditions to produce clones of a plant. The tissue culture plants of banana which were of excellent quality and growth were being sold to the farmers at subsidized rate of Rs 10 per plant.
He said that this banana variety was developed at the plant tissue culture lab set up at horticulture training institute, Uchani, Karnal under National Horticulture Mission during the year 2006-07. Chatha informed that prior to this, during the last one year the main crops of Banana, Potato, and Gladiolus were tried for commercial production and found a high success rate for mass multiplication of the crops. For further mass multiplication of the potato and banana, the mother cultures were being procured from Central Potato Research Institute, Shimla and Biotechnology Centre, department of horticulture, Karnataka, respectively.
The minister further said that the new technologies will prove immensely beneficial to the farmers in increasing the productivity of their crops. He said that in view of the low replacement rate of seeds the productivity of the crop was low, especially potato seeds in the state. With the introduction of this technology, the high quality potato seed would be made available to the farmers at affordable rate.
The finer details of mass multiplication of potato seeds had already been worked out and a project of Rs 50 lakh was sent to Centre for approval. Expansion of existing tissue culture lab along with shade-net and poly-net houses would be taken under the new scheme “National Horticulture Mission” in the current financial year.