BT firm to set up banana centre

Mysore, famous for the Nanjangud variety of ‘rasabale’ plantains, will soon have a banana centre for excellence.

The Mysore-based Labland Biotech Pvt Ltd has decided to establish the centre in Mysore. It is aimed at setting up a highly-advanced tissue culture laboratory for banana, to provide information and training to farmers, to establish a National Banana Germplasm Bank, to offer services in managing the problems in the banana field and find appropriate solutions, and to provide market support.

Labland chairman Sudheer Shetty announcing it here said, it will feature the yielding banana plants produced through tissue culture by Labland Biotech.

Venkatesh, a local banana grower had procured 2,050 tissue culture banana plants from Labland last year and cultivated them on his two-acre land with the cultivation practices recommended by Labland. These plants have yielded about 82 kg per plant, a record compared to the average of about 40 kg fruits per plant.

Labland has built a tissue culture facility to produce about 5 million seedlings a year where high yielding banana seedlings are produced from high yielding plants. These seedlings have become popular for their high yield.

The production facility is accredited by the national accreditation agency, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India. With its core strength has initiated contract cultivation in a village in Chamarajanagar district, said Shetty.

Currently, India is the largest banana producer in the world (about 30 per cent of total global production) with an annual production of over 17 million tonnes accounting for about 1.647 Million hectares of land under banana cultivation. Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar are the major banana producing states in the country. However, the export market share is a meager one per cent with an export of 25,013 tonnes during 2008-09, said Labland Managing Director Geetaa Singh.

As regards Karnataka, banana is cultivated on 52,613 ha with an annual production of 1.3 million tonnes and a productivity of 24.6 tonnesôha. This is below the national average of 30.6 tonnes/ha. The main constraints are low plant density, local preference for low yielding varieties like Elakki, poor crop management, prevalence of virus complex such as bunchy top, banana streak and bract mosaic and fungal diseases.

These constraints can be removed by the use of tissue culture technology, she added.