An insect, a resin, an income

For many, ₹4,000 a month may seem a tiny sum, but for Sheela Singh, an adivasi woman from Panihai village in Madhya Pradesh’s Satna district, it means both economic empowerment and a sense of purpose in life.

Sheela has learnt the art of making products from lac and now teaches the technique to other women in her village. This will enable them all to earn while working from home.

The story repeats itself in Uttar Pradesh’s Mirzapur district. Here 27-year-old Tarkeshwar from Aamoi village is able to earn about ₹40,000 in a season from cultivating lac in the two bighas of land his father owns. Just a few years ago he was labouring for daily wages.

Not just him, even several women in his village, including his mother and wife, are able to earn the extra buck by making products from the lac he cultivates.

Thanks to Bioved Research Institute of Agriculture and Technology (BRIAT), thousands of men and women in northern India are earning a living or adding to their incomes through lac cultivation and lac craft.

For the uninitiated, lac is the scarlet resinous secretion of several species of lac insects, of which the most commonly cultivated is the Kerria lacca . To cultivate lac a farmer has to procure a stick (broodlac) containing eggs that are ready to hatch and tie it to the chosen host tree to be infested. This is followed by millions of lac insects colonising the branches of the host trees and secreting the resinous pigment. The coated branches are later cut and harvested as sticklac. In India the most common host trees include Dhak ( Butea monosperma ), Ber ( Ziziphus mauritiana ) and Kusum ( Schleichera oleosa )

To make products out of lac, the harvested sticklac is crushed and sieved to remove impurities. The sieved material is then washed several times to get rid of insect parts and other soluble material. The product that remains is called seedlac. The prefix seed refers to its pellet shape. Seedlac, which still contains a small percentage of impurities, is processed into shellac by heat treatment or solvent extraction.

Initially BRIAT, located in village Shringverpur, nearly 25 km from Allahabad, trained over 2,000 farmers in scientific methods of lac cultivation. Most of the farmers were from four districts — Allahabad, Chitrakoot, Mizapur and Sonbhadra — where there is no livelihood apart from agriculture and stone cutting.

Due to the abundant availability of lac host plants in these areas, lac cultivation has proved to be a boon for the farmers here. BRIAT has also established a lac value-added chain in Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh involving voluntary organisations, a few that are under UNDP projects and some directly.

A range of products including jewellery boxes, penholders, paperweights, paintings, and agarbattis can be made from lac. Himanshu Dwivedi, a research scientist at the premier institute says they even make flower vases out of cow dung coated with lac and these have been sold to five-star hotels.

“The objective is to see how value can be added to the bio-products, so that a farmer or any villager is able to earn more without migrating to urban areas,” says Brijesh Kant Dwivedi, Director BRIAT.

“The local flavour of creative art enriches the products,” says Anupam Dahiya of the Srijan Samajik Sanskritik Evam Sahityak Manch, whose members underwent training in lac cultivation from BRIAT to propagate it among villagers for their economic empowerment.

Apart from lac cultivation and craft, BRIAT has trained thousands of farmers, rural youth and women’s self-help groups in other rural technologies including low-cost dairying, high-tech plant nursery technology, pearl farming and agro-related technologies. Among the many tools developed by it, one of the most popular is a portable, low-cost soil testing kit that gives results in just 30 minutes.

The research institute has trained over 250 unemployed youth as master resource persons to work in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Bihar and Haryana. Each resource person, in turn, trains at least 50 to 100 unemployed youth every year. BRIAT also helps rural folk set up their own production units and markets their products.

“When I go to a village I tell the Pradhan (head) that if I get just five active youth for the village we will train them in all these technologies that are beneficial for farmers and rural development,” says Himanshu.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi

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