SILCHAR, Sept 4 - Changes in the pattern of rainfall in the North East is posing a serious threat to the conventional tea propagation methods which are losing viability because of rapid climate change, global warming etc. feels Supratim Roy Choudhury, a young Silchar-based biotechnologist.
In his words, North East has tremendous prospect for horticulture, but lack of quality planting material is a big challenge to the farmers here.
Against this backdrop, Supratim, who is the Director of Pratyaksha Agrotech Private Limited established in 2013, will set up a tissue culture laboratory in collaboration with the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Silchar.
Talking to this correspondent, Supratim said �tissue cultured tea plants can solve this problem faced by the tea growers as it can be produced round the year and are not dependent on environmental conditions.
�Moreover, the tissue cultured tea plants are disease free, true to type and genetically identical. This will be a research and development based laboratory, first of its kind in India under the Start-up India scheme of the Government of India for production of tissue cultured tea plants. The estimated cost of the project is Rs 3.5 crore.�
He claimed that the tissue culture process for tea plants will be available to the cultivators at a much cheaper rate than the conventional modes. The biotechnologist-turned-entrepreneur informed that he is also involved in the process to set up a pineapple processing unit for production of canned pineapple here.
