Preferential use of Bamboos for Industrial Production of Incense sticks

Incense stick, known as "agarbatti" in India, is used exclusively worldwide for religious and other purposes in almost every home. Bamboo, popularly known as green gold or poor man's timber, forms the only significant raw material for the incense stick industry. The primary concern of the stakeholders of the bamboo sector is identifying the right choice of raw material to maximize the industrial production which otherwise contributes to low outturn in India presently as compared to other major stick producing countries. The market functionaries take advantage of farmers' lack of knowledge, and make substantial gains. Therefore, the paper investigates the preference of the notable species, age, and the part of the culm of bamboo used for the production of incense sticks, amongst > 100 stick makers (artisans/workers) and entrepreneurs in Tripura, India, by a questionnaire developed using the five-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree continuum. The data obtained were statistically analyzed using MS –Excel. The results indicated that all study parameters were significantly different among eight species viz., Bambusa polymorpha, B. vulgaris, B. cacherensis, B. tulda, B. balcooa, M. baccifera, Dendrocalamus asper, and D. longispathus which formed part of the experiment. Among the bamboo species Bambusa tulda is the most preferred one having a mean likert scale of 4.89 followed by Dendrocalamus longispathus (4.06), Bambusa cacharensis (3.54), Bambusa polymorpha (3.50), and so on. The most preferred bamboo age is third year culm (4.32), followed by fourth and second year culms. It can be concluded that third year culms of B. tulda should be preferably harvested and from which, middle portion of the culm should be extracted to become the most promising raw material for agarbatti industry for better outturn and profitability of the agarbatti industry.