Surgical cotton export opens up lucrative oppurtunities for Indian farmers

PUNE: Desi cotton varieties are likely to open up a huge export market of surgical cotton, giving a remunerative alternative to cotton farmers from rain-fed areas like Vidarbha. India is the only country that grows desi cotton varieties highly suitable for surgical cotton.

The project of high-density cotton cultivation using desi varieties, being implemented by the Central Institute of Cotton Research , has been extended to 37 rain-fed districts this year after being implemented in 8 districts of Vidarbha last year.

The aim of the project is to increase cotton yield in shallow soils where Bt cotton is not suitable. The coarse fibre of desi cotton rolls easily in large layers. With large untapped export market and a huge unmet domestic demand, farmers have been getting more price for desi cotton over its Bt counterpart in the last 7-8 years.

“The desi cotton production in the country is not enough to meet the domestic requirement. If we can increase its production, we will be able to develop an export market,” said PR Ramasubramanian, deputy general manager, Ramaraju Surgical Cotton Mills, a leading manufacturer of surgical cotton with an annual turnover of Rs 250 crore in 2012-13. In the high-density planting system used in this project, the aim is to get 1,800 kg lint/hectare from a plant population of 1.67 lakh plants/hectare.

“Even if each plant bears six bolls of 4 gram each, we can get 1,800 kg lint from a hectare,” said K Kranti, director, CICR. This method of cultivation is used successfully in Brazil, where cotton is grown in rain-fed shallow soils with five times the Indian shallow soil cotton yield. More than 30% of the cotton area in India consists of shallow cotton soils, especially in the Vidarbha region. Bt cotton is not suitable for these soils as it requires high input costs and timely irrigation.