Research highlights and business opportunities in floriculture

Abstract

Floriculture is the fast emerging sector in horticulture sector and people are changing very fast from the traditional field crops to flowers because of high returns per unit of area and better price. The flowers are being used during the all the occasions. Though an art of growing flowers is not new to India, large scale commercial scale cultivation, protected cultivation in poly houses is relatively new in India. Enormous genetic diversity, varied agro-climatic conditions, versatile human resources offers. With the opening up of world market in the WTO regime there is a free movement of floriculture products worldwide. India is having a better scope in future as there is a shift in trend towards tropical flowers and this can be gainfully exploited by country like India with high amount of diversity in indigenous flora. At the same time the arboriculture and plantation of seasonal flowers has been emerged another venture to improve the ambience of the locality every where. The biotechnology tools must be exploited for the crop improvement to evolve novel varieties with desirable traits. The work on other crop like chrysanthemum are in progress and two varieties viz. Pusa Anmol and Pusa Stabdi have been evolved in chrysanthemum using biotechnological tools at IARI. The work on protected cultivation has been made on a large scale however another area like value addition in the form of extraction of pigments, essential oils, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical compounds has emerged as one of the frontline avenues in floriculture. We have many challenges ahead likeTrained HRD, quality planting material to compete in global market and limited choice of the varieties and products in the market.