When NECTAR turned poison for bamboo

New Delhi’s renewed bid to turn bamboo into gold is riding a repackaged failure. This has made many in the Northeast, which grows 67% of India’s bamboo, wary of the “redesigned mission”.

Bamboo farmers and entrepreneurs in the Northeast got a flicker of hope when Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley allocated ₹1,290 crore in Budget 2018 for a restructured National Bamboo Mission (NMB).

President’s ordinance

This followed President Ram Nath Kovind’s ordinance in November 2017 amending the Indian Forest Act to rid bamboo, botanically a grass, of its tree tag for 90 years and exempting it from requiring permits for felling or transportation.

But a sense of deja vu soon crept in. This was primarily because of the failure of the ₹1,400-crore NMB from 2007-2014 as well as a related initiative called the North East Centre for Technology Application and Reach (NECTAR) that has refused to budge from New Delhi to its ‘headquarters’ in Meghalaya capital Shillong since its creation five years ago.

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) had in 2004 launched the National Mission on Bamboo Application (NMBA) with an outlay of ₹200 crore.

In almost a decade since, the NMBA has spent ₹100 crore on building demo bamboo houses that hardly impacted lives across India’s bamboo belts.

An amount of ₹40 crore, refundable in instalments, was also provided to entrepreneurs as technology development assistance for partly procuring machinery and equipment. Contrary to its name, the NMBA neither developed any technology nor facilitated technology transfer for the assisted units.

Import duly slashed

Bamboo entrepreneurs said the NMBA also failed to develop market linkages and virtually went off the radar. To add to their misery, the Centre slashed duty on imported bamboo products from 30% to 10%.

Unable to compete with cheaper bamboo products – allegedly Chinese routed through Southeast Asian countries – in the domestic market, 99.7% of the 385 bamboo units formed with NMBA’s assistance shut shop.

As the fortunes of the bamboo industry nosedived, the Centre realised the NMBA was remote-controlling the sector from New Delhi. In 2013, the Union Cabinet approved the creation of an autonomous society registered and headquartered in Shillong with a fund allocation of ₹292 crore.

The society was called NECTAR.

“NECTAR was basically old wine in a new bottle. The entire team that made NMBA a failure was rehabilitated in NECTAR without any responsibilities being fixed. Worse, it became more distant and redundant for the Northeast, where much of bamboo grows,” Rajib Goswami, president of Bamboo Industries Association of India (BIAI), said.

NECTAR, though, isn’t all about bamboo. It covers “local and natural resources” of the region comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.

Apart from providing technical expertise to market local products, its mission included women empowerment and skill development.

But NECTAR’s role, entrepreneurs say, has been minimal except for occasional tours by officials to “use up funds” meant for creating livelihoods and employment.

Soon after its formation, NECTAR began functioning from the same space of the DST Secretary’s office in New Delhi from where the NMBA operated. But DST was apparently unaware that NECTAR operated from the same building, as replies to BIAI’s queries reveal.

Efforts by entrepreneurs to make NECTAR serve its purpose finally made Praveer Asthana, former DST Secretary, instruct NECTAR’s Director General Sanjiv Nair on October 24, 2016, to relocate to Shillong.

The instruction was ignored, as was that of the Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences on April 17, 2017.

Ashutosh Sharma, the incumbent DST Secretary, put the ball in NECTAR’s court when asked to update on its status.

“We have asked Central Public Works Department, Shillong, to make the office ready in the premises provided by the Survey of India. They are yet to start work. We expect work to start within a month and make it ready within next three months,” Baldev Singh Rawat, NECTAR’s Director General, told The Hindu from New Delhi.

“After several such assurances to shift, we hope this time it is for real so that NECTAR serves its purpose. We also hope the society brings in people who know the Northeast and are serious about changing fortunes in the region,” Mr. Goswami said.

Former Assam CM Prafulla Kumar Mahanta had last year wondered if NECTAR had been created to mean poison for bamboo-based industry in the Northeast.

He also demanded an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation into misuse of bamboo funds that left many who invested in the sector in the lurch.

Huge market

Regional trade bodies say the Northeast is crucial for India to tap the estimated $10 billion market potential of bamboo.

India has the world’s largest fields of bamboo. It grows on nearly 13% of the country’s forest land. The eight North-eastern States – Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura – grow 67% of India’s bamboo and have 45% of global bamboo reserves. Nearly 35 species of superior quality bamboos are found in the region.