Indian Institute of Natural Resins and Gum (IINRG) on Wednesday organised ‘Kisan Mela cum Exhibition – 2016’ on campus premises to promote lac and natural resins. The workshop was inaugurated by Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Department, Randhir Kumar Singh along with Birsa Agriculture University (BAU), VC, Dr George John and MlA Ramtahal Choudhary.
Approximately 27 stalls of different lac research centres exhibited their collections and as many as 1000 farmers participated in the event. 12 institutes working for promoting lac and resins and have done outstanding work in the field were felicitated on the occasion.
IINRG focuses its attention on crop harvesting and tapping, processing, development of products, training, information repository, technology dissemination and liaison with other national and international agencies to promote lac and resins worldwide. The leading producer of lac is Jharkhand, followed by the Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, and Maharashtra .
“It is mandatory to implement separate budget for lac cultivation and research. In order to boost its production, for the first time separate proposal in the state budget 2015-16 will be proposed. The government will also try to include lac production in agriculture section and make it tax free. Presently, it comes under forestry products and tax is incurred on it,” informed, Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Department, Randhir Kumar Singh.
Farmers conference (Kisan Gaushti) was also organised on the occasion to expose farmers to the modern age technology and make them well versed with other contemporary agriculture and husbandry issues. Experts from Indian Institute of Agriculture and Biotechnology, Birsa Agriculture University shared opinion and suggestions on varied diverse aspects which include silk production, poultry farming and others.
IINRG is involved in many core projects such as productivity and quality improvement, crop production system management, processing, storage and quality management, value addition, application development and product diversification, capacity building of farmers along with entrepreneurship development and technology evaluation, refinement, dissemination and demonstration.