NRL, NBDA ink MoU for sourcing 2 L tonnes of bamboo annually

Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL), a Government of India Public Sector Enterprises under Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Nagaland Bamboo Development Agency (NBDA), a state government undertaking, today inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for sourcing two lakh tonnes of semi-processed bamboo annually.
The MOU was signed by Agriculture Production Commissioner and Mission Director NBDA, Imkonglemba representing the state government and General Manager Marketing and business development, NRL, Golaghat in Assam, B Ekka in NBDA, Dimapur.
Imkonglemba said the present availability of bamboo in the state was around nine lakh metric tonnes.
Bamboo needs to be harvested in three years and NBDA has decided to tie up with NRL as their requirement was two lakh metric tonnes per annum, he said adding, NBDA would be working on promoting bamboo entrepreneurs.

Imkonglemba expressed confidence that more than 200 people would be given indirect employment when sourcing of Nagaland bamboo to NRL takes shape.
Ekka said the NRL was also implementing a bio-refinery in Assam for producing bio-ethanol from available non-food bio-mass feedstock.
He said for the proposed project, NRL would be sourcing bamboo from Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.
NRL has joined hands with a Finland-based technology provider Ms Chempolis who has third generation technology to convert bamboo to ethanol in commercially viable basis, which was much ahead of other established technology providers for conversion of bamboo to ethanol, Ekka added.