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Bamboo Plantations of Katlamara: A development strategy for the rest of rural India
Katlamara is a sleepy rural community in Western Tripura located in the Northeastern region of India. Katlamara is located about 40 km north of the capital city of Agartala and is one of the many border villages along the Indo-Bangladesh international border. It is a very fertile area rich with vegetation and organised farms for rice, vegetables, tea and a particular species of bamboo, Bambusa affinis, locally called Kanakais.
This is an amazing bamboo with very interesting properties. This clump forming species can be planted in very closely spaced plantations which seem to be based on a creeping rhizome due to the density and distribution of the plants culms as seen in the picture above. The diameter of the mature culms vary from about 15 mm at the base to as much as 50 mm for some plants depending on a number of variables. The slender poles are traditionally used for fishing poles, about 1.5 meters long, and many farmers have established export linkages for this particular application over the past forty years or so. The thicker and taller poles of diameter 25 to 30 mm and 2 to 2.5 metres in length were exported as pole-vault poles to many destinations. Thicker and even longer poles were exported to Mauritius as boatmans poles to push and propell boats in coastal and swallow waterways.
Today these applications are coming under pressure from global changes and the farmers are unable to get a good price for their cultivated produce. The bamboo plantations of Katlamara are significant since it is unusual in India to find such large scale and systematic plantations of bamboo outside the forest land hold area due to many policy and other reasons dating back to the days of British rule in India. In Katlamara, bamboo is a cash crop for the farmers, since there are very few local applications except the making of fences and some house building components, where many other species planted around the homestead are used to meet local needs. Ofcourse, the ubiqutous Muli bamboo which grows wild in the nearby forest and govenment land along watercourses and roads, is used extensively for the local building and fence making tasks along with other locally available species of bamboo other than Bambusa affinis.
I visited Katlamara in 1986 while on a project for the Government of Tripura and was amazed at the fact that such systematic plantation could provide high quality material for new applications of great value. This influenced me to think of our strategies with bamboo and in my Bali paper of 1995 I proposed for the first time the farm to industry model for rural development which I later elaborated as part of the UNDP National vision report called "From the Land to The People: Bamboo as a Sustainable Human Development Resource for India". The six stage model for developemnt proposed was accepted by the UNDP in 1999 and the major initiative of bamboo promotion started in India with UNDP funding through DC(H). The Katlamara experience was the seed for the model. Over the past four years, through BCDI and now with BENU, a local NGO, we have developed the remaining linkages needed to demonstrate that bamboo can indeed help transform the rural economy if handled in an appropriate manner and that too in an eco-friendly and sustainable manner.
Our recent efforts at product development was therefore informed by many yaers of experimentation with a number of bamboo species and strategies for rural empowerment that led to the current framework of using a very reduced tool set and in limiting the material variety to help the local craftsmen stand on their own feet without feeling helpless due to shortage of funds and access to resources. The products developed had to have characteristice that permitted them to find local markets an at the same time be suitable for upmarket presentation as the community grew in confidence to take on the more sophisticated markets of urban India and eventually the high value export sector.
The "Katlamara Chalo Workshop" conducted from 23 May to 4th June 2005 at Katlamara created new products and a design strategy that can help kick-start the local economy which we estimate can grow from low value farming of a few million Rupees to a multi- million Rupee industry based on micro and small enterprises with very small investments and a supportive infrastructure and policy umbrella from the Government.
See the other links above for a picture story of the "Katlamara Chalo Workshop" and the product strategy that was developed. 40 craftsmen and women from the community were trained to build our new products and we hope to catalyse further action in collaboration with industry and Government participation in the months ahead.
M P Ranjan
Head, NID Centre for Bamboo Initiatives
Faculty of Design
Faculty Member on the Governing Council
National Institute...
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