Agricultural innovations are required to give impetus to Rural Industry in order to suffice the home demands and globalization.While housing is a primary need that is potentially an engine for growth, agricultural structures such as green houses, grain and vegetable dryers, cattle shelters, grain silos are essential for improving the competitiveness of Indian agriculture and ensuring food security as recognized by National Horticulture Mission. Hence, under Component 4 of National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the above program is being launched. The objective of NAIP under component 4 is to build capacity to undertake basic and strategic research in frontier areas of agricultural sciences to meet challenges in technology development in the immediate and predictable future. The present sub-project on "Bamboo as a Green Engineering Material in Rural Housing and Agricultural Infrastructure for Sustainable Economy", having roots in HUDCO - IITD collaborative effort namely "National Resource Facility for Bamboo Technology (NRFBT)" and pioneering work done at Haritha Ecological Institute A.P., aims at establishing a Rural Based industry that will give impetus to rural economy by realization of potential of Bamboo as a Green Engineering Material in sustainable and economically viable way.

This project aims to develop standard specifications and guidelines for usage of bamboo for different structural applications and the effect of preservative treatments through systematic scientific investigations. Moreover, to assure designs with safe life, detailed study on the long term creep/fatigue behavior and durability issues for the bamboo, bamcrete elements and the joints will be carried out. This requires extensive experimentation. This project endeavors to establish realistic test procedure and cost effective instruments which will be necessary to generate the extensive data. Idea of shaping bamboo in the growing stage for direct structural application will be tested. Moreover, demo-structure of the agricultural infrastructure - rural house, cattle shelter, green house and grain silos - will be constructed using the outcome of the above research.

Sadly bamboo remained as the poor man's timber in spite of being a high performance light weight functionally graded composite and with almost no parallel, particularly in delivering a given performance for unit cost. A substantial body of data on bamboo has been generated the world over in the past four decades and has painted a picture that is far from being sharp. Extensive basic experimentation is still the need of the hour that hopefully would enable us to see the rhythm in the huge diversity of the properties of bamboo, bordering on near randomness by making the picture sharp. The modern engineering designers would then be able to more confidently begin to accept bamboo as a green engineering material and eventually as the most dependable partner in our fight against global warming.

Establishment of bamboo as a Modern Building Material can alone generate the necessary massive demand to make the bamboo plantations remunerative and greening of degraded lands in economically viable manner. This will trigger a sustainable growth for the rural economy and also help ease global warming by reduction of the use of cement and steel.

Need For Present Research :

Bamboo, a non-characterized and non-validated material having vast potential in Agricultural infrastructure including rural housing.

Lack of effective eco-friendly preservative treatment.

Growing of pre-shaped structural elements of bamboo is an un-explored and promising idea.

Need for studying the existing bamboo structures and grain storage bins in India to understand the Traditional Knowledge of Tribals.

Number of species of bamboo are nearly 120, so cost effective ways of testing them required to generate enough data to build confidence on usage of bamboo.

No existing design guidelines available for using bamboo as an engineering material.

Need for an economically viableway for greening the degraded lands.

INNOVATIONS :

Systematic study of rheological properties of different species of Bamboo material.

Shaping Bamboo in its initial growth stage for structural applications.

Systemetic Study of Traditional Bamboo structures and experimental evaluation of novel Bamboo Concrete Composite (Bamcrete) structures and establishment of their testing, design and construction methodologies.

Development of Cost effective test equipment for measuring the rheological properties(short and long term) of bamboo, the joinery and the structural elements with bamboo/bamcrete.

Design, Development and Demonstration of Bamboo Based selected applications for sustainable Bamboo Cultivation - Rural Housing, Cattle Shelter, poultry cages, green houses, solar driers, Grain Silos, etc., for sustainable growth of rural economy.