Environment
The History of
Mushroom Cultivation in India
People have been
eating mushrooms for a long time. They used to go the forests and other
wild places and based on their personal knowledge of edible and poisonous
mushrooms they used to collect the edible ones. Even now some people
collect wild mushrooms from the forest and eat them. Sometimes they turn
out to be poisonous and have harmful effects. In India the “Guchhi”
mushroom was a delicacy known to the people prior to the 1950’s. It came
mostly from Kashmir.
Around the early 1950’s the government of Himachal Pradesh appointed Shri
S.S.Jain as its first Asstt. Plant Pathologist and Mycologist for the
state. He worked in the Wild Flower Hall in Chharabra, Shimla. He was
touring the interior areas of Himachal to help the apple orchardists and
the farmers control the diseases of apples, other fruits and crops like
potatoes and wheat. He noticed the poor hand to mouth condition of the
poor farmers in the hilly state of HP. He wanted to help them.
While staying with some farmers in interior areas he noticed that there
were rotting twigs and branches of apple and other fruit trees and wheat
straw in the barn along with cow dung and in the environmental conditions
there were a profusion of mushrooms growing in the dark barns.
This led him to think of using the waste material with the farmers for
growing edible mushrooms. He searched the literature and found that edible
mushrooms were being grown in France and Japan. He made a research
proposal on growing of edible mushrooms and got the permission for the
same from the state government and obtained the mushroom spawn from Japan
and France and started a laboratory in Solan, Shimla Hills and started his
research experiments on growing edible mushrooms of Agaricus and other
species, in laboratory conditions simulating those found in Himachal
Pradesh.
When he was able to grow the mushrooms successfully on substrate prepared
from rotting apple tree twigs and branches, cow dung and wheat straw etc.
he published the results through the magazine of the HP state Extension
department. These results when publicized and brought to the notice of the
farmers and the poor people people in the state led to dissemination of
information and spawn to them and mushroom farming started in Himachal
Pradesh.
The laboratory established by Shri S.S.Jain, the pioneer of mushroom
cultivation in India later became the only important centre for training
in mushroom cultivation to farmers of Himachal Pradesh and other states as
also the mycologists and plant pathologists from all over India. Mr. Seth
and others actually worked with Shri Jain and later became important in
the area of mushrooms. But it is a fact that Shri SS Jain in Solan
successfully completed the first research project in India. Shri Jain left
Solan in 1962-63 for Cuttack.
Shri S.S.Jain then became the OSD and set up the first campus and office
of the HP Agricultural University in Solan and later joined Central Rice
Research Institute,
Cuttack Orissa under the ICAR as a Senior Scientist Plant Pathologist and
retired from there in 1978 after having published over a hundred research
papers and also having been the Chief Editor of the International Rice
journal “Oryza”. Shri Jain had also done a monographical study of the Stem
Rot disease of rice and also discovered the bacteria Xanthomonas oryzae,
which caused the Bacterial Blight disease of rice, and Dr Devdath did his
Ph.D on this bacteria and disease. Before Shri Jain expired after
prolonged coma in Apollo Hospital Delhi and a small nursing home in Baraut,
District Baghpat (Meerut), UP, he had been an award-winning President of
the Rotary Club Baraut for his excellent social service work also winning
International citation from Rotary.
Now the mushroom cultivation in India is something I could not have
imagined from what I saw in the laboratory in Solan. I found a huge
factory in Maharashtra near Talegaon, Lonavala, where there were huge
godowns in a factory where tray upon tray of white beautiful button
mushrooms created a sense of wonder and awe in me and I began thinking of
the experiments of my father in the small room in Solan way back in the
50’s when I was a student and used to walk to his office nearby and have
lunch with him in his laboratory. By chance the Mycologist in that factory
turned out to be one who had undergone training in the laboratory
established by my father in Solan.
Mushroom cultivation has become a huge export oriented industry and large
foreign exchange earning business and also profitable for small time
growers. Many Universities and State departments of agriculture as also
private people are giving training in growing mushrooms, which are mostly,
exported and also used in many good hotels in a variety of culinary
delights.
–RK Jain, IRS (CCE) Commissioner, Customs & Central Excise, South Kerala,
May 22, 2005
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