Guwahati: When a farmer in the hills of Tripura started using technology to grow better bamboo, he wasn’t thinking about national policy. He was thinking about his family’s income. When a group of women in Dimapur started turning bamboo shoots into packaged food products, they weren’t trying to make a statement about sustainable economics. They were trying to run a business.
But added together — multiplied across Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Sikkim and Assam — these individual acts of quiet enterprise are collectively writing a story that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to tell to the entire nation on Sunday, in the April edition of his monthly radio broadcast, Mann Ki Baat.
The green, fast-growing plant that once cluttered the forests of Eastern India as an afterthought — cut back, burned or simply used for producing few utensils— has, in the span of a few years, become one of the Northeast’s most exciting economic frontiers.
A shift in policy
The story of bamboo’s transformation in India has a precise turning point: 2017.That year, the government took bamboo out of the legal category of “trees” — a seemingly bureaucratic move that turned out to be genuinely revolutionary. Under the old classification, felling or transporting bamboo required forest permits and clearances that made commercial cultivation a cumbersome, often impractical exercise. Farmers who wanted to grow bamboo on their own land could not freely sell or move what they harvested without running into layers of regulation.
Removing it from the tree category changed the ground rules entirely. Suddenly, bamboo could be cultivated, harvested and traded with the kind of ease that agricultural commodities deserve. For a region like the Northeast — where bamboo grows abundantly across vast stretches of land and has been woven into the culture, cuisine and construction traditions of communities for centuries — this was a signal that the Centre was finally paying attention.
PM Modi, on April 26, Sunday, cited this policy shift as the spark that unlocked the sector’s dormant potential. And the Northeast, it turns out, was ready to run with it.
Bamboo changing lives
In Gomati district of Tripura, a farmer named Bijoy Sutradhar didn’t wait for a government scheme to tell him what to do. He integrated technology into his bamboo cultivation — improving output, monitoring quality, and getting more from his land than traditional methods had ever allowed. Not far away, in South Tripura, Pradip Chakraborty was doing much the same, blending precision and patience to build a bamboo-growing operation that was yielding measurably better results.
These are not large corporations. These are individual farmers — the kind of people who rarely make national headlines — quietly proving that bamboo, when taken seriously, is a crop worthy of investment and attention. PM Modi chose to name them specifically in his Mann Ki Baat address and there is something significant in that choice. In a country where agricultural innovation often gets discussed in the abstract, citing real names and real places grounds the story in lived experience.
Naga women story
Perhaps the most compelling thread in the Northeast bamboo story is what is happening with self-help groups — particularly in and around Dimapur, Nagaland.
Women’s collectives in these areas are doing something deceptively simple but economically powerful: they are adding value. Rather than selling raw bamboo — which fetches modest prices — they are processing it into food products, packaging it, marketing it, and tapping into a consumer base that is increasingly drawn to natural, locally sourced goods. The economics of value addition are straightforward: you earn more per unit when you sell the finished product than when you sell the raw material. But the organisational effort required to make that happen — quality control, consistent supply, packaging standards, distribution — is anything but simple.
That these groups are pulling it off is a testament to grassroots enterprise that no policy document can fully take credit for. In a different part of the region, an enterprise called Khoroulo Creative Craft is channelling bamboo into furniture and handicrafts — products with growing market appeal both domestically and internationally, as consumers globally shift toward sustainable, natural materials and away from plastic and synthetic alternatives.
The Mizoram story
In Mizoram’s Mamit district, the approach is more technical. Teams there are working on bamboo tissue culture — a laboratory-based propagation method that produces disease-free, high-quality bamboo planting material at scale — alongside poly-house management that allows for more controlled growing conditions. It is the kind of agricultural science that, until recently, was associated almost exclusively with high-value horticulture crops. Applying it to bamboo represents a meaningful leap in how seriously the sector is being treated.
Sikkim: Bamboo meets lifestyle
In Sikkim, the Lagastal Bamboo Enterprise Team has taken a deliberately broad approach to what bamboo can become. Their product range — handicrafts, incense sticks, furniture, and interior décor — reflects a sharp understanding of where consumer demand is heading. Bamboo décor, in particular, has seen growing interest from urban buyers who associate it with wellness, sustainability, and an aesthetic rooted in nature. Sikkim’s entrepreneurs appear to be tapping into that demand with a range wide enough to serve multiple market segments simultaneously.
Bamboo shines in Airport
No example of bamboo’s new status in the Northeast is more striking — or more visible — than the new terminal at Guwahati’s Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport.
Inaugurated by PM Modi in December 2025, and aptly named “The Bamboo Orchids,” the terminal draws its design inspiration from Assam’s iconic kopou phool — the foxtail orchid — and indigenous bamboo varieties including Bholuka bamboo from Assam and Apatani bamboo from Arunachal Pradesh. Around 140 metric tonnes of locally sourced bamboo from the region have been used across the terminal, positioning it among India’s most prominent examples of nature-inspired airport architecture, where traditional craftsmanship has been reimagined through modern engineering. The terminal has already won several International recognitions.
Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma made exactly this point on April 26, Sunday when he echoed the Prime Minister’s remarks, calling out the airport as a living example of bamboo’s transformation. “Bamboo, which was once considered a burden in the forests of Eastern India, is today a symbol of innovation”, CM Sarma said, urging people to go Vocal for Local and buy a bamboo product from the Northeast.
