Aroma Bio-village project launched in Sonia's, Rahul's constituency

Lucknow, Aug 4 (UNI) A day after Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati opened the agriculture for the private sector in the state, the United Progressive Alliance(UPA) government at the centre today launched the ambitious 'Aroma Bio-village' project in two districts of the state.

Union minister of state for science and technology Kapil Sibal launched the pilot project prepared by Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants(CIMAP) in Rae Bareli and Sultanpur, represented in Parliament by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul respectively.

Under this project, farmers will be adopting CIMAP technologies to develop the waste lands, particularly salt-affected marginal land, for production of Aromatic plants.

Yesterday, UP government had launched a new Agricultural Infrastructure and Investment policy opening the farm sector to the private players to do their retail business.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is also visiting UP on August 8 to discuss strategy to initiate growth rate of the agricutlure sector in the 11th plan period.

Mr Sibal said under the pilot project 60 farmers of the two districts would be trained to cultivate 20 hectare of waste land.

The minister said the reasons for selecting Rae Bareli and Sultanpur for the pilot project was that most of the salt affected waste land had been identified in these two districts.

Through research at the CIMAP, it has been established that many aromatic plants do not reuqire intensive agri-inputs and hence can be cultivated well under natural stress conditions.

As a special feature of this Aroma Bio-village mission, newly developed processing and warehousing facilities will be made available in these bio-villages so that the aromatic plants can be commercially cultivated on industrial scale.

CIMAP director SPS Khanuja said here that bio-village programme will give special impetus to popularise medicinal and aromatic plants cultivation such that farmers are directly linked with industry through the technology provider with the aim to increase the production and ensure market opporutnities and mitigating the unemployment problem in rural areas.

In this Aroma bio-villages project, essential oil bearing grasses of economic importance like Lemongrass, Palmarosa, Vetiver will be taken up for stressed soils where as in irrigated areas, mint and Indian basil will be ingtegrated in the existing cropping system.

He said each bio-villae will be self sustaining cluster having facilities for nursery raising to cultivation and post-harvest processing. Besides, linkage with the industry of essential oils would be established to facilitate marketing of the produce of the farmers.

UNI