New Delhi, Sep 12 (IANS): The reforms in the bamboo sector have opened doors to greater innovation, entrepreneurship, and value addition for millions across the country, especially in the Northeast, where bamboo is driving employment, business, and innovation, a government factsheet said on Saturday.
Bamboo was closely linked with traditional livelihoods across communities, but an outdated regulatory barrier once held back its true economic potential.
Under a British-era law, bamboo was classified as a tree, which made harvesting and transporting it unnecessarily cumbersome for the people who depended on it.
In 2017, the government took a landmark step by removing bamboo from this classification, freeing it from restrictive forestry regulations, according to the factsheet.
The National Bamboo Mission focuses on cultivation, processing, and market access for bamboo farmers, manufacturers, and sellers. It also supports nurseries for quality planting material.
Further, the North East Centre for Technology Application and Reach (NECTAR) has supported bamboo technologies across several commercial applications.
These include food and agro-processing, construction materials, manufacturing machinery, renewable energy, industrial products, etc.
These interventions have generated employment of around 30 million man-days annually.
They have also raised value addition for bamboo commodities from 10 per cent to as high as 70 per cent.
For example, engineered bamboo is opening new possibilities in the field of construction. Engineered bamboo is a composite material made by binding and compressing raw bamboo fibres, strips, or particles.
Furniture made with new designs and engineered bamboo is gaining popularity and attracting the attention of architects, designers, and interior decorators.
Consequently, more than 42 lakh square feet of engineered bamboo structures have been built for disaster relief and rehabilitation.
In Chhattisgarh, 576 school rooms have been made from engineered bamboo, housing about 20,000 children.
“This shows how bamboo is moving into construction applications once associated only with conventional industrial materials,” said the factsheet.
