Banana fibre in Bihar: the remarkable story of an industry and an entrepreneur!

Patna: Bihar farmers plant banana in around 28,000 hectares of land every year. The banana plant is the largest herbaceous flowering plant. The plants are normally tall and fairly sturdy and are often mistaken for trees, but their main or upright stem is actually a pseudostem that grows 6 to 7.6 metres (20 to 24.9 ft) tall, growing from a corm.

Each pseudostem can produce a single bunch of bananas. After fruiting, the pseudostem dies, but offshoots may develop from the base of the plant. Many varieties of bananas are perennial.

The relevant point here however is, the stem invariably goes waste. On the whole 22 districts in Bihar grow banana, some of them on a vast scale. Each acre of banana plantation may have up to 1300 tress. This may give you some idea of the banana waste output of entire Bihar. So what should be done?

According to standard data, not widely known in Bihar, a full 1 km of fibre may be extracted from 12-15 banana trees. A plantation thus with 1300 trees can give a producer 85 kms of fibre length. But what are the uses of the banana fibre? And this is where the producer may hit the jackpot.

Banana fibre is used in a variety of industries starting with high quality paper to weaving of saris in South India and Gujarat. The fibre also finds use in high quality security/currency paper, packing cloth, ship towing ropes, wet drilling cables etc.

India also occupies the largest area under Banana cultivation in the world covering approx. 11% of world area of Banana. Banana fiber can partially replace the consumption of Cotton and Jute fiber in India. It has excellent potential for export to Far-east Asian and South Asian countries like Singapore,Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

Banana farmers and entrepreneurs in Bihar are thus sitting on a gold mine that they are not aware of. There is one person however who has taken the initiative in Bihar. Virendra Dayal who has a small scale unit in Bidupur, Vaishali took the trouble to get himself trained in the technique of fibre extraction before he put up his industry. He now says he has captive clients who pick up his produce and he doesn’t have to go chasing after them – a major advantage in the case of Bihar where farmers often find tough to seek markets.

Mr Dayal lays down a simple calculation to explain the profitability of the industry – one acre of land will give you 1200 stems approximately. Roughly 12 stems give you around 1 kilo of fibre. Companies willingly pay Rs 150-200 for a kilo of fibre. He started his industry with a machine he bought for the royal sum of Rs 80,000 and a large room as a factory. He is now planning to upgrade the machine with an investment of Rs 150,000. Does that give you an idea of the scale of investment?

You can do the rest of the calculation yourself. Mr dayal does not forget to add that the banana stem juice may be processed into high value molasses as well.  So far we have thought of banana fibre from the entrepreneur’s viewpoint. Once you include the farmer and the local labour employed, you get a complete picture of the potential of this industry.