Village Of the Future

Secret of good bamboo construction is availability of good bamboo. Not all bamboo is as strong as steel. There are many variables like age, culm diameter, wall thickness and moisture content. As modern bamboo construction in Nepal (and South Asia), is in its embryonic stage, there aren’t many commercial suppliers who can provide quality grade bamboo. Today the commercial use of bamboo is for scaffoldings for which the concern for age, maturity is often overlooked by contractors. The contractors harvest anything they see for short term profit, thus promoting a very unsustainable harvesting regime. For a long time we had planned to start our plantation but we never had the financial resources to do so. We could only limit ourselves to establishing a nursery where we have collected over 20 indigenous and exotic species of bamboo. We have two hectares of land where we started our nursery based on permaculture principle. Its obvious we love bamboo,  but we also realize over obsession of one plant could lead to development of monoculture as its happening in China. Thus we have collected hundreds of plants that have different nutritional, medicinal and utilitarian value in our model farm. Read more..

“A Million Bamboo” Campaign:

In 2010, there was big flood in Chitwan (adjacent to our nursery) that washed away hundreds of acres of land. Incidentally, only land that had bamboo or was embanked got protected  thus villagers had a self realization that bamboo can be a sustainable and economic method of embankment.  They approached us to help them plant bamboo along the river bank. We made an informal agreement that they will buy bamboo from us, plant it, nurture it and we will buy the mature culms from them. We have started our pilot project this year and if it gets successful we will expand it with a campaign  ”A million bamboo from the Terai to the Himalayas.”

As mentioned earlier, we know the threats of monoculture so we are also promoting other crops like lemongrass, moringa, vetiver, ginger etc. that have nutritional, commercial and  utilitarian value and can grow along river banks. We dont want to take away fertile land from farmers, so we are only focusing on degraded and marginal lands.  Eventually, we want to add value to the plants by producing essential oil, natural fiber, briquettes, energy via gasification, furniture, construction materials etc. Moreover, the beauty of this project is, villagers will also invest on value addition, so that the project apart from being financially sustainable will have a sense of community ownership. This will all lead to a creation of sustainable community- ambitiously named ”Village of the Future.”