MYSURU: Due to various medicinal values in neem tree, the Central government plans to grow more than 20 million neem trees across the country especially at the proposed smart cities in days to come, said Sudershan Kumar, senior principal scientist at National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow. Speaking at one of the ISC sessions on Wednesday, he said, "In days to come DDT will be replaced by neem which has got multipurpose use. Though DDT was restricted in 2011 itself, even today every year India produces 6,000 tonnes of DDT annually for the eradication of mosquitoes and other pests and exports nearly 2.90 lakh tonnes to Africa. We are into research and preparing neem based product to eradicate malaria. In the proposed smart city concept in 100 cities, neem saplings will be planted on roadsides. Uttar Pradesh will have at least a lakh of them, followed by Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. For the past three years China has been showing great interest in neem plantations. They have planted more than 14 million trees and have a 40% share in the global export of neem products," he added. He also mentioned that all the smart cities will have a web portal which will have detailed information about the cities, including details about the plants and medicinal properties. T Drone technology will also be used to review images of plants and their precise location.GPS Raghava, senior scientist at Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh, speaking on genome diversity and personalized medicine, "Genomes vary from individual to individual and it's not advisable to give same drug to everybody. In future genome-based medicines will be available. But how to annotate the genome is a big challenge for the experts. Genome annotation will provide biological information." Anil Rai, Centre for Agricultural Bioinformatics, said, "There is strong need for next green revolution in agriculture to ensure food and nutritional security for the projected world population of 9.1 billion by 2050 by environmentally sustainable ways through supplementing it with gene revolution. There are nearly 7000 plant species with potential to be used as food but in India 95% of them are using just 30 different plants especially rice, wheat and maize. They should start using other food crops as well. For the last 40 years, we have increased food production by just 40%."
Source : The Times of India