Was visiting with my Biogas friend Priyadarshan at his Nere farm. Saw some new bamboo planted. Priyadarshan mentioned that he had got the saplings from a nursery in Chinchwad, which only stocks bamboo. We got curious and the cycling group went over to Chinchwad. Just opposite the Tata Motors Chinchwad Foundry main gate is Gawade colony, which is where this nursery is located. Ajeet Thakur is an electrical engineer, who has made his career in lead acid battery charging and installation systems. A lot of thermal plants in India use his equipment even today. About 30 years ago, he bought some land in the area in which Aamby valley has come up today. There was some bamboo already growing on the land. With the help of his neighbours, he got some more uda bamboo (dendrocalamus ritcheyi) from the jungles around. The entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity. Bamboo could be developed into a cash crop.
This started Ajeet’s quest for the perfect bamboo. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, so what Ajeet was looking at was identifying bamboos which can create the right marriages between nature and applications. Take an example of the most common urban application of bamboo – the ladder. Did you know that ladder construction requires two species: the hollow vertical members and solid transverse members. A bamboo’s pipe design for the vertical members has got the best torsional strength. Like in the ladder, the internal construction of the bamboo also has solid nodes, which using a mechanical analogy can be thought of as stress absorbing tie rods. Or to use a civil analogy, these nodes work like a building’s slabs and the hollow verticals serve as columns.
To spread the bamboo message amongst the community, Ajeet started stocking bamboo saplings in his Chinchwad bungalow. Soon, he realised that he needs to get into the business of growing saplings. He narrowed down on the Tamhini area. The engineer inside him did a lot of evaluation to finally select the site. Surrounded by hills on two sides, situated at 300 ft above sea level, he found his ideal plot at the base of the Tamhini ghat. Polyhouses were put up to ensure a consistent growing environment for his saplings. CO2 levels are higher in polyhouses and this improves growth. Nature had other plans for Ajeet. When cyclone Nisarg struck that area a few years ago, he lost 50% of his saplings – and all his polyhouses. Reconstruction has just finished. What helps is the hardiness of the bamboo. Fun fact, after the Hiroshima atomic bombing, bamboos were the first plants to get back in action.
Ajeet has identified a dozen species which have the highest commercial potential. Dendrocalamus Giganteus, a species of Indonesian origin, is the biggest plant in his list. It can grow to diameters of 30 cm. Ajeet’s favourite is the yellow bamboo, it’s a great show plant with straight vertical growth. It’s also expensive – sells for Rs. 1500 per sapling at his nursery. My favourite Ajeet quote: ‘Before you become a farmer, become a philosopher.’ Ajeet philosophises that a sapling’s value is always underestimated. This is something that the business minded Gujju community understands well. It takes about Rs. 1.5 to 2 lakh worth of saplings for one acre of bamboo plantation. One of his Gujarati visitors wanted to know if he can further increase that investment by buying better saplings – and hence increase his Return in investment!
Applications are mostly in construction and furniture – but new ideas keep emerging. Tiles made from bamboo plies do not warp with season changes, wooden ones do. A trick that magician Ajeet loves to play on his audience: in the middle of the conversation he hands you over a tall bamboo stacked in one corner of the room. Within seconds muscles are disbelieving the eyes. The stick is virtually weightless. You can attach a cable operated plucker to this stick and use it in harvesting. Works great for Chikoo and Mango. I asked Ajeet about whether we can use this contraption for Jamun harvesting. He recommends using a mango harvester in conjunction with a carry bag. The low density bamboo also finds applications in badminton rackets, bamboo cycles and fishing rods. Bamboo requires no pesticides, as it has antibacterial chemicals. A team from Sahyadri hospital visited Ajeet recently in Pune to explore the use of bamboo stock for making surgical cotton!
It takes 3 years for a bamboo to finish off its vertical growth. Apart from seeds, bamboo can also be propagated through cuttings or tissue culture. What is interesting is that the mass of a cone shaped bamboo shoot is the same as that of a fully grown bamboo. Ajeet uses an analogy to explain. Think of the shoot as a car antenna which extends one node at a time. Daily growth rates can be upto 3 feet per day. There is a species of non tapering bamboo also. Wonder how those shoots look like: cylindrical or conical? Once full height is reached, typically within 2 months at the rate of one node a day, the walls of the grass start thickening. The maximum thickness is reached at the age of 6 years, which is when the bamboo is ready for harvesting. Ajeet recommends using a color code to keep track of age. A palette of 3 colors is enough. Say, red is used for bamboo shoots of 2016, green for 2017 and blue for 2018. In 2019, when the 2016 bamboos get harvested, you use red again for marking the 2019 shoots. Lignification helps in keeping the bamboo termite free. There are cycles of lignification – and you harvest at time when it is at its highest, it’s like astrologers finalising muhurats for a mundan. The muhurat is usually the Amavasya that follows holi. This is the time the water content is the minimum – which ensures that pests don’t like the taste too much. Traditionally, after harvesting, the bamboo is first kept in flowing water and then smoked. Storage is in a vertical position.
Bamboo is a grass that flowers rarely. Unlike grass and wheat seeds, the bamboo seeds’ reproductive span is relatively short. It has a shelf life that ranges from 21 days to 12 months. After seed life is over, it can still be eaten as a grain – bamboo rice. When bamboo does flower, it has a very different idea of parenting. Once the kids are born, it is time for the parent to die. Bamboo is a dominant crop – and it does not allow anything to grow around it. And this is the reason for the parental suicide. The seeds are left to themselves to sprout and grow in the space that has been vacated by the parents.
In his 30 year association with bamboos, Ajeet has seen flowering only 7 times in his gardens. The fruits are so abundant then that it is said that the rat population shoots up because of the availability of so much nutrition. (There is a hypothesis that this surge in rat population is also accompanied by the plague.) The interval between flowering can be anywhere between 40 to 90 years. And the interesting part is that quite a few of the species flower at the same time no matter where they are located. Nature gives Swiss watchmakers a run for their money, in the accuracy and longevity of its chronometers.
Bamboo is as long lived as humans. So you can expect returns for 90 years on your investment in a bamboo plantation. I asked Ajeet about the risk factors – but did not receive a clear answer. He remarked that it is such a hardy species, that to kill bamboo, you require a lot of effort. Compared to its other grass family members like rice and sugarcane, it consumes much less water. (Cane is a member of the palm family, but sugarcane is a grass.) Bamboo does consume more water than jowar and bajra. There are bamboo species which are drought resistant – but their commercial potential is not as attractive.
The good news on the business front is that bamboo was earlier classified as a tree by forest officials. This made commercial cultivation difficult. Permission had to be sought from the government for cutting down and transporting bamboo. Now it has been reclassified as a grass, so it’s much easier to become a bamboo planter now. The agricultural economy of the North east is heavily dependent on bamboo. Young bamboo shoots are a yummy ingredient in a lot of South East Asian cuisine. They are as popular with animals as with humans, hence Ajeet recommends that any bamboo plantation must have fencing. And also a soil layer of at least 3 feet. My idea is to have portable fencing, which can be used to grow a bamboo boundary around a plot. Another idea that I discussed with Ajeet was to have living grass houses. Some amount of concrete grouting will be required on the perimeter of the inner floor area for this, as bamboo clumps propagate themselves by sending runners all around. Should be an interesting project for my friend Sumithra, an architect who loves working with bamboo.
In the last 30 years, Ajeet has developed his own runners of bamboo friends all across the country. His favourite areas remain the hills – where most of the wild bamboo is still found today. His travels take him often to the north east, where his friends remark that there is no nursery there to rival the one that he runs at Tamhini. (In the North east, forests continue to be sources of good stock.) The good news is that the next generation of Thakurs is now active in business. Ajeet’s daughter was earlier working at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. She and her husband now help Ajeet run the business. His daughter also makes some cute jewellery out of bamboo. Ajeet can be reached at [email protected]