Imported date plants worth Rs 40 lakh stolen in Kutch

Bhuj, May 20 (UNI) Imported date plants developed through Tissue Culture technique, worth Rs 40 lakh, have been stolen from the godown of Kutch District Dates Consortium at Chubadak village, near here.

According to a complaint lodged with Chubadak police, the Kutch District Date Consortium had imported around 2,000 tissue culture date plants, priced at Rs 2,300 per plant, from Dubai. The officials of the Consortium last week noticed that 1,800 plants were stolen from the godown.

Farmers of Kutch have been using seed technique to grow date plants traditionally. Since Tissue Culture has yielded good results in Saudi Arabia, farmers of Kutch started experimenting with it for the last five years.

India is the world's largest importer of dates with imports of 20,00,000 tonnes in addition to the 50,000 tonnes of dates produced in Kutch and Rajasthan.

The application of Tissue Culture techniques for date palm is also called in vitro propagation. It has many advantages in comparison to the two traditional techniques-seed and offshoots propagation.

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