Project Bandhan
- July 1, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Project Bandhan
Context:
- Project Bandhan launched to tackle pink bollworm menace in cotton.
- Pheromone trap, mating disruption being used to restrict the pest population
Project Bandhan and Innovative technique :
- As the pink bollworm infestation spreads in cotton plants in North India, stakeholders including the Central Institute of Cotton Re- search (CICR), State agricultural universities and private players including the South Asia Biotech- nology Centre (SABC) are taking up large-scale demonstration of the use of technologies such as mating disruption and pheromone traps to tackle the dreaded pest.
- The idea is to arrange for the protection throughout the season — from the flowering stage to harvest.
- Mating disruption is an innovative pheromone-based technique that interferes with the reproductive cycle of pink bollworm (PBW) in such a way that the population is significantly reduced and crop dam- age is minimised.
- The Central Insecticide Board and Registration Committee (CIBRC) had approved the technology in the integrated pest management (IPM) strategies for controlling PBW in India for the first time in 2019-20.
- As part of this, CICR and the other players have come out with PBKnot, a solid metric dispenser rope which can be easily tagged to the cotton plants.
- The PBKnot charges the surrounding air with Gossyplure, a pheromone scent that confuses the male adults
- SABC-trained farm labour tagging PBKnot tech at Sirsa (Haryana) preventing them from finding and mating with female adults and reducing the number of eggs laid and controlling the PBW population.
- “The mating disruption has emerged as a powerful tool to manage pests such as PBW,” said Bhagirath Choudhary, Director, South Asia Biotechnology Centre (SABC), Jodhpur, which is implementing a large-scale “Project Bandhan” to control the spread of PBW across 16 districts of seven major cotton-growing States this kharif.
- Project Bandhan will be implemented in some 19 clusters across the country in partnership with Ambuja Cement Foundation, PI Foundations, Agrovision Foundation, State Agriculture Universities, KVKs and local organisations under the technical guidance of ICAR-CICR, Nagpur.
Pink bollworm (PBW):
- The PBW, which surfaces early in the kharif season of North, typically has a short life cycle and can multiply 4-5 generations in a crop cycle, potentially threatening cotton from early stage, flower, green bolls and cotton locules, affecting cotton lint quality.
- It is an insect known for being a pest in cotton farming.
- The pink bollworm is native to Asia, but has become an invasive species in most of the world’s cotton-growing regions.
- The female moth lays eggs in a cotton boll, and when the larvae emerge from the eggs, they inflict damage through feeding.
- Since cotton is used for both fiber and seed oil, the damage is twofold.
- Their disruption of the protective tissue around the boll is a portal of entry for other insects and fungi.
- Infestation on susceptible cotton is generally controlled with insecticides.
- Populations of bollworms are also controlled with mating disruption, chemicals, and releases of sterile males which mate with the females but fail to fertilize their eggs.