A Staff Reporter
DIMAPUR, DECEMBER 8
The Nagaland government’s long-running ambition of transforming the state’s sprawling groves of bamboo – also peddled as green gold – into hard currency received a major boost with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Nagaland Bamboo Development Agency (NBDA) and Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL) on Tuesday.
NRL is a government of India public sector enterprise under the ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, which runs a bio-refinery in Assam dealing in the production of bio-ethanol using non-food biomass feedstock bamboo.
According to the MoU signed today, the Nagaland government would source 2 lakh metric tonnes of semi-processed bamboo to the NRL, annually. The annual production of bamboo in Nagaland, according to Commissioner & Secretary and APC, Imkonglemba Ao is at 9 lakh metric tonnes currently.
Imkonglemba however stressed that it was still only an MoU and that finer details/modalities would be worked out once it becomes a memorandum of agreement. “By the beginning of the next financial year, we hope that the ball will start rolling,” he said.
General Manager (Marketing and Business development) of NRL, B Ekka also expressed optimism that the venture would prove successful to both the parties involved. He informed that the NRL has entered into a partnership agreement with the Finland-based bio-refinery technology company, Chempolis, in the year 2014 to produce bioethanol using bamboo.
Considering Nagaland’s vast reserve of bamboo, he said that “it makes a lot of sense for us to source bamboo from here.” A similar understanding has also been made with the government of Arunachal Pradesh, he added. The NRL’s aim is to produce foty-eight thousand metric tonnes of bioethanol per year, he also informed.
The MoU was signed here today at Nagaland Bamboo Resource Center, Dimapur. It would enable the establishment of bamboo processing units across the state which, in turn, could help provide means of employment to the local people.
