VISAKHAPATNAM: The menace of bamboo smuggling for furniture and basket making, construction works and paper production is on the rise in north coastal AP.
Official forest records reveal that bamboo is spread over 1,700 sq km of forest land (reserved, unreserved) and green belts (non-forest area) in the region. In terms of volume, there is roughly 960 million clumps of bamboo. Dendrocalamus Strictus is the most commonly available species of bamboo and a clump weighs on an average 4 to 5 kg. More importantly, bamboo can be harvested every once in three years, which means close to 700 truckloads of yield can be potentially extracted.Read More…