Telangana Agriculture Minister, K. Niranjan Reddy laid the foundation stone for the construction of the Tissue Culture Lab at Jeedimetla in Qutbullahpur Mandal of Medical Malkajgiri District.
This tissue culture lab is supposed to be a stepping stone to achieve major success in the Telangana Ku Haritha Haram program started by the Telangana government in 2015 under the Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao.
Agriculture minister K. Niranjan Reddy also told the journalists that State will produce horticulture and forest-related plants on a large scale through the upcoming Tissue Culture Laboratory and supply them to farmers to help achieve the ambitious aims of the Telangana Ku Haritha Haram program. It aims at increasing the vegetation cover of the state from 24% to 33%.
The lab will be developed by Telangana State Seed Development Corporation (TSSDC) and is according to the agriculture minister is aimed to make plants give out higher yields via the usage of the latest technology and scientific methods.
This laboratory was developed by the state for a sky-high price of 4.2 crores and is the first state-of-the-art tissue culture lab of its kind in the public sector. The lab is also aiming to produce fruits, flowers, spices, medicinal, forest and ornamental plants through this new technology and selling them to other states.
Although the creation of tissue culture lab is a step towards a better future for Indian agriculture, The plantation drive program it is implemented under however has not achieved any significant success, in fact, it can be argued that it has only caused more harm than good by displacing tribal people from their homes and only being able to increase green cover by only 163 square kilometres in two years revealed the India State of Forest Report-2019 (IFSR).
The aims of the programme made the protectors of the forests go around in plantation drives while people smuggled and exploited the forests that they were supposed to protect.
