India is the largest producer of raw jute and jute goods in the world, contributing about 60 per cent of the global production and providing livelihood to about five million people in farming and trade industry.
Although, the domestic market continues to be the mainstay for jute sector, of late, our export market share is also showing an increasing trend. India earns about Rs 2200 crores per annum through jute goods export because of biodegradability and eco-friendly nature of this fibre. However, to be suitable for high valued diversified products, the quality of fibre needs further improvement. Besides the genetic background of the jute varieties, the quality of the fibre largely depends on retting process adopted by the farmers, said Dr Gouranga Kar, Director of ICAR-CRIJAF, Barrackore.
This year, initially, there was a setback in jute farming due to the outbreak of Coronavirus. Also Amphan cyclone wrecked a havoc on the crop in the third week of May. Despite COVID outbreak and the cyclone, there is a good standing crop because of the efforts of ICAR-CRIJAF and other stakeholders like National Jute Board, Jute Corporation of India, etc. Now that the harvesting and retting have started, there is a need to adopt the technology of improved retting, so that best quality fibre is obtained.
In this context, Dr Kar mentioned that recently a breakthrough in jute retting research has been achieved by scientists of ICAR-CRIJAF who have decoded the genome sequences of jute-retting bacteria by high throughput genome sequencing. The in-depth genomic analysis significantly revealed three different species of Bacillus constitute the consortium strains. Genome sequencing also confirms that retting bacteria degrades pectin, hemicellulose and other non-cellulosic materials, non-harmful for fibre. The bacterial strains are also non-toxic and thus the retting water with microbial strains can successfully be used for irrigation purpose. The sequence data has been submitted to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database of NIH, USA.
These retting bacteria were already incorporated in the microbial consortium, called “CRIJAF Sona” developed by ICAR-CRIJAF. Owing to its popularity, in last three years alone, 1428 MT of CRIJAF Sona worth Rs 7.85 crore was sold to 3.6 lakh farmers covering more than 50,000 ha area in different jute growing states of the country.
While congratulating the team of scientists, Dr Gouranga expressed that such breakthrough is first of its kind in jute and is confident that these findings will help the scientists improve the microbial retting formulation for better efficiency and resilience. The genes for degrading pectin, hemicellulose and other non-cellulosic materials can be altered for enhanced retting efficiency and shortening the retting duration with minimal water usage. Thus, this breakthrough will facilitate to produce high quality jute fiber by farming community which will fetch higher income in the market.
The findings of the genome sequence research is recently published in journal Scientific Reports from the Nature Publishing group. Ref Datta, S. Saha, D Chattopadhyay and Majumdar B (2020).