Bamboo as a sustainable crop for land restoration in India: challenges and opportunities

Degradation of land implies either a provisional or permanent deterioration in its productive potential, which has an adverse impact on agriculture, biodiversity, and the environment. Land degradation is common in many nations across the globe and has severe adverse environmental consequences. It has a negative impact on livelihood as it diminishes agricultural land productivity, endangers food security, and raises disease risk. Previous studies have confirmed that various bamboo species have efficient in land restoration programmes due to its growth potential and wide acceptability in socio-economic benefits. Therefore, present governments are interested in funding bamboo-related land restoration programmes across the globe. In this context, we have made an attempt to review the current state of the art of landscape restoration programmes and the role of bamboo plantations with possible influence on economic, social, and political factors in the Indian scenario. This review highlights various restoration programmes of bamboo with detailed explanations, such as heavily contaminated areas, village drylands, fly ash dumps, mine contaminated soils, deforestation programmes, etc. The present study has discussed various success stories of bamboo plantation programmes and the challenges in its implication. It is estimated that about 30% of India's land area is degraded, and erosion is the primary cause. To control this, bamboo is one of the suitable plants as it has a wide variety of species available as per the local climate of India. Over 30 years, bamboo has played the role of a sustainable crop for land restoration and received massive attention from stakeholders. Furthermore, the study has pointed out site-specific bamboo species and its gene bank information, which could be very helpful in restoration programmes of degraded land in near future.