Vol. 10, Special Issue 1, Part F (2026)

Bamboo is a versatile crop. It can be used in 1, 500 different ways including as food, a substitute for wood, building and construction material, for handicrafts and paper. Around 80 per cent of bamboo forests lie in Asia with India, China and Myanmar having 19.8 million hectares of bamboo. India is the world’s second largest cultivator of bamboo after China, with 136 species and 23 genera spread over 13.96 million hectares. According to the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare, India’s annual bamboo production is estimated at 3.23 million tonnes. However, despite all this, the country’s share in the global bamboo trade and commerce is only 4 per cent. Bamboos are very diverse, arborescent, perennial and non-wood forest trees classified under grass family with very vast sociological, environmental and commercial importance. Propagation techniques are in practice for bamboo, such as seed propagation, clump division, rhizome and culm cuttings etc. But these traditional techniques coupled with many serious limitations or disadvantages for fulfill the large or mass scale demand of genuine quality planting materials propagation. At present for large scale production of quality planting material don’t possible only through these classical methods, and in this situation, mass multiplication of genuine quality planting material of bamboo with fast pace is possible only through highly technical method or in-vitro tool of micro-propagation. Classical methods are largely in -efficient and also unsafe for the production of insect-pest free quality planting material. For mass scale propagation, largely insufficient and inefficient and micropropagation is the only viable bio-technological tool / method. Indeed, the order of magnitude of the demand for bamboo planting material indicates that micropropagation will largely inevitably be necessary for large scale propagation. According to very early history of plant tissue culture, attempts to induce the isolated cells into generating tissues masses by cell division were successful at achieving limited growth with root-explants of Pisum, Zea and Gossypium, and that was a bright spot during 1922 -1938 period by Kotte (1922a, b)) and Robbins (1922a). The potential of micro-propagation for production of insect-pest free good quality genuine planting material or mass scale propagation of bamboo has provided high hopes and a lot of research has been focused on the development of protocols for large and rapid scale propagation. These encompass optimization and establishment of in vitro culture techniques including micropropagation, somatic embryogenesis, in vitro flowering, macro proliferation, field performance and clonal fidelity. This research note briefly provides the state-of-the-art information on tissue culture mediated biotechnological interventions made in bamboo for large scale plant production through micropropagation, that being the need of the hour. Bio-technology has made very crucial contribution to the development of different forest and horticultural crops ranging from mass propagation of elite varieties, developing disease free stocks, in the directed breeding of new cultivars or varieties for sustainability in Agro-forestry. In October 2006, the Government of India (GOI) had launched the National Bamboo Mission (NBM) on the basis of the National Mission on Bamboo Technology and Trade Development Report, 2003. Reva flora Culture is a ISO 9001:2008 certified and recognized by NCS-TCP (Department of Bio-technology) tissue cultured lab situated at near Village-Borlai dist. Barwani (M.P.) and produced genuine good quality planting material of different species of green gold or bamboo as per demand of the different organizations including Govt. of M.P., Maharashtra, Telangana, Assam, U.P. and Bhutan and produced more than 35.00 lakhs of bamboo plants with the production stock of 49000 lakhs of different species of bamboo.