Lalrinngheti Sangsiama
The arithmetic is straightforward and worth doing slowly.
The Government of Mizoram receives, in a typical year, approximately sixty-six lakh rupees in royalty from the harvest of bamboo — almost the entirety of which comes from Melocanna baccifera, the species that constitutes around ninety-five per cent of the state’s standing bamboo stock (Vanlalruati, Zarzoliana and Thlanga, 2024; Department of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, n.d.). Sixty-six lakh rupees is six and a half million rupees. At current exchange rates, it is approximately seventy-five thousand United States dollars. This is the annual public return to the state, from a bamboo resource that the Forest Survey of India estimates at 2,205 million standing culms — roughly nine and a half per cent of India’s national bamboo stock (Forest Survey of India, 2019).
The same Forest Survey records that Mizoram supplies approximately fourteen per cent of India’s annual commercial bamboo output (Forest Survey of India, 2019). India’s national bamboo industry, on the most recent published figures, generated an annual output of ₹12,507 crore in financial year 2021 and is currently valued at approximately ₹28,005 crore as a sectoral industry (India Brand Equity Foundation, 2025; Press Information Bureau, 2025). On either of those national figures, the share of value attributable to Mizoram-origin bamboo, distributed proportionally, runs from a conservative ₹1,750 crore to a higher-bound ₹3,920 crore per year. If one uses the broader industry-and-products market valuation of ₹50,135 crore for 2022 (Grand View Research, 2024), the figure approaches ₹7,000 crore.
The state of Mizoram receives sixty-six lakh rupees. The processed value of its bamboo, captured in the supply chains that pass through it, is at least ₹1,750 crore.
The ratio is approximately 1 to 2,650.
This essay is an attempt to set out where that ratio comes from, why it persists, what mechanisms produce it, and what would have to change for the relationship between Mizoram and its dominant biological resource to be governed by something closer to a fair accounting. The numbers are conservative; the institutional arrangements are concrete; the politics is documented. None of it is an accident of geography. All of it is a set of choices.
the price of a pole
The Mizoram bamboo royalty system, as it has operated in essentially its current form since the Pawi-Lakher Autonomous Region (Forest) Act of 1954 and the various state and central regulations layered on top, is structured around a contracting institution called the Mahal System (Vanlalruati, Zarzoliana and Thlanga, 2024). The state’s reserved forests — approximately 4,483 square kilometres of designated reserve, which contain the bulk of the high-quality M. baccifera stands — are divided into zones called mahals. Annual harvest rights for each mahal are sold to bidders called mahaldars (Forest Survey of India, 2019; Vanlalruati et al., 2024).
The mahaldar pays the state a royalty per culm extracted. The royalty rate, as documented in field reporting by Nitin Sethi for Down to Earth in the run-up to the 2006–08 mautam, is ₹1 per pole (Sethi, 2007). One rupee per culm — for a structural plant material that mature mahaldar-purchased culms are sold downstream into a national supply chain at multiples that paper mills and traders are not in a hurry to publish, but which conservative trade estimates put in the range of ₹50–150 per culm at the first wholesale point, before any value-addition occurs (Forest Survey of India, 2019; Vanlalruati et al., 2024).
The mahaldars, historically and at present, are not from Mizoram. They are predominantly from the Cachar district of Assam, immediately to the north of Mizoram, where the Hindustan Paper Corporation Limited’s two paper mills at Panchgram and Cachar form the principal commercial buyers of Mizoram-origin bamboo (Sethi, 2007; Vanlalruati et al., 2024). The bamboo is harvested in Mizoram’s reserves, floated down rivers or transported by road to staging areas, transferred across the state border into Assam, and absorbed into the paper-pulp supply chain or into trader networks that route the material onward to processors elsewhere in India.
Three features of this system deserve to be named clearly.
The first is that the royalty captures only a tiny fraction of the value that the harvest creates. At ₹1 per pole, even by the lowest available wholesale figures, the state receives between one and two per cent of first-sale value. The remainder — between ninety-eight and ninety-nine per cent of the wholesale price the mahaldar receives, before any further processing — is captured by the mahaldar and the downstream chain.
The second is that local communities, including those whose traditional territory includes the forests being harvested, have no harvest rights of their own under the Mahal System once a mahal has been allocated. As Vanlalruati and colleagues note, “local people have no rights to harvest bamboo in a Mahalder’s forest and must pay the mahaldar if they wish to take any culms” (Vanlalruati, Zarzoliana and Thlanga, 2024, p. 1043). The system therefore not only routes value out of the state but, within the state, prevents communities from accessing the resource for non-extractive uses. Households that have used a particular forest for generations, for housing material or weaving stock or fuel, must purchase that material from outside contractors who have purchased the right to charge for it.
The third is that the regulations governing the system — particularly the rule limiting harvest to four-year-old culms, intended to protect rhizome integrity and ensure regenerative capacity — are, by the state forest department’s own admission, weakly enforced. Immature culms are routinely cut, and the long-term productive capacity of the stands is being depleted at a rate the Forest Department’s own reports describe as ecologically unsustainable (Vanlalruati, Zarzoliana and Thlanga, 2024). The mahaldar bears no consequence for over-harvesting because the mahaldar’s contract is annual; the depletion is the state’s, the next bidder’s, and ultimately the region’s problem.
The Mahal System, as it stands, is therefore a structural arrangement that minimises state revenue, concentrates downstream value in non-Mizoram actors, denies local communities access to their own forest material, and creates an ecological externality that the system itself does not internalise.
where the value goes
The downstream uses of Mizoram-origin bamboo are not difficult to trace, because they correspond to the principal commercial applications of M. baccifera and adjacent species in the South and Southeast Asian bamboo economy. Five segments dominate.
The first is paper and pulp. Hindustan Paper Corporation’s mills at Cachar and Panchgram have historically been the largest single buyers of Mizoram bamboo, processing the harvested material into wood-free paper, kraft paper, and packaging-grade pulp (Sethi, 2007). The mills’ capacity is roughly 300,000 tonnes per year combined, of which a significant fraction has historically been bamboo-fed. Although both mills have faced operational challenges and periods of closure in recent years, the broader Indian paper industry remains a substantial absorber of bamboo pulp, with India importing approximately ₹150 crore of bamboo pulp annually despite domestic abundance — a figure that itself indicates the underutilisation of the Northeastern resource (India Business Trade, 2025).
The second is the agarbatti (incense stick) industry. Bamboo splints form the structural core of the Indian incense industry, which by Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises estimates is worth several thousand crore rupees per year and which has, until recent policy interventions in 2019 restricting raw-batti imports, sourced most of its splint stock from imports rather than from Northeast India (Press Information Bureau, 2025). The structural absurdity of importing bamboo splints into a country whose Northeastern states sit on Asia’s largest M. baccifera reserves has been formally acknowledged by the National Bamboo Mission and is the subject of recent corrective policy.
The third is engineered bamboo for construction. Cross-laminated bamboo, laminated bamboo lumber, bamboo strand-woven panels, and bamboo plyboard collectively form a global market valued at approximately US$26.7 billion in 2024 (Persistence Market Research, 2025). India’s share of this market remains below four per cent despite its raw-material abundance. A small but growing engineered-bamboo sector exists in Karnataka, Kerala, and Maharashtra, drawing predominantly on Dendrocalamus strictus and Bambusa balcooa species, with relatively limited use of M. baccifera — a species suited mechanically to engineered applications but absent from the engineering specification literature, an absence that effectively excludes it from this segment.
The fourth is bamboo fibre textiles. The Indian bamboo fibre market was valued at approximately ₹1,290 crore in 2023–24 and is expected to grow at over ten per cent annually, driven by export demand for sustainable textile alternatives (Intel Market Research, 2025). The fibre is processed primarily through viscose-style chemical methods that require pulp-grade bamboo input — exactly the kind of input that the HPCL paper mills produce from Northeast Indian raw material. The textile factories that absorb this fibre are concentrated in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu.
The fifth, and growing, is bamboo packaging, furniture, and consumer goods, valued at several thousand crore in aggregate and largely produced outside the Northeast (India Brand Equity Foundation, 2025).
The pattern is consistent across all five segments. Mizoram-origin material enters the supply chain near the bottom — as harvested raw culms or as primary pulp processed in Assam — and the value-addition occurs progressively further from Mizoram, in factories, mills, and brands located in central, southern, and western India, or in export markets. By the time a bamboo viscose textile is sold to a European retailer at ten or twenty times the value of the original culm, almost no part of that value chain has flowed back to the state where the material originated.
the calculation, made explicit
I want to set out the numerical comparison explicitly, because it is the empirical core of the argument and the figures deserve to be visible rather than smuggled past the reader.
State revenue from bamboo royalty (Mizoram): ₹66 lakh per year (Vanlalruati, Zarzoliana and Thlanga, 2024; Sethi, 2007)
Mizoram’s share of India’s commercial bamboo supply: 14 per cent (Forest Survey of India, 2019)
India’s annual bamboo industry output (FY21): ₹12,507 crore (India Brand Equity Foundation, 2025)
Implied gross value of Mizoram-origin bamboo at industry level, by simple proportion:
₹12,507 crore × 14 per cent = ₹1,751 crore per year
Ratio of state revenue to industry-level value:
₹66 lakh ÷ ₹1,751 crore = ₹66 lakh ÷ ₹1,75,100 lakh ≈ 1 part in 2,650
This is, deliberately, the conservative version of the calculation. Two corrections push the estimate higher.
First, the National Bamboo Mission’s own cited figure for the bamboo and rattan industry of India is ₹28,005 crore, somewhat higher than the FY21 output figure (Press Information Bureau, 2025). On that basis the implied Mizoram share is ₹3,921 crore.
Second, the Indian bamboo market — which incorporates downstream products, exports, and value-added segments not fully captured in primary industry-output figures — was valued by Grand View Research at ₹50,135 crore in 2022 (Grand View Research, 2024). On that figure the implied Mizoram share is approximately ₹7,019 crore.
The ratio of state revenue to value generated downstream is, therefore, between 1 in 2,650 and 1 in approximately 10,600 depending on which national valuation one accepts as the appropriate denominator. Either figure is consistent with the qualitative claim made in the title of this essay: that the state collects sixty-six lakh rupees per year while the processed value of the same material, captured outside the state, runs to a thousand crore and upwards.
The figure of ₹1,000 crore is a floor, not a ceiling.
It is worth pausing on what these numbers do not include. They do not capture the value of bamboo absorbed into local consumption — household construction, weaving, food (the shoot, mautuai) — which represents a substantial portion of the total harvest but is not commercialised through the Mahal System and does not enter the formal economic accounts. They do not capture the long-term ecological value of the standing forest, which is being depleted at a rate that will, eventually, foreclose the very industry currently extracting from it. They do not capture the cultural value of the species to Mizo identity, which is not the kind of thing that appears on any spreadsheet but which is real, and which has been, in the political history laid out elsewhere in this journal, a foundational element of regional self-determination.
The ratio above is the ratio that the formal economic accounting produces, and the formal economic accounting is what state planning frameworks act on. Other valuations exist; none of them are doing the work that the formal accounting is doing.
this is not an accident of geography
A common explanation for value-chain leakage from peripheral resource regions is geographic — the cost of moving raw material to processing centres, the disadvantage of distance from markets, the difficulty of sustaining industrial infrastructure in mountainous terrain. Each of these considerations applies to Mizoram. None of them is sufficient to explain the ratio above.
The geographic explanation is undermined by several specific facts.
The first is that the closest large-scale processing infrastructure — the Hindustan Paper Corporation mills in Cachar — is located within fifty to a hundred kilometres of the Mizoram border. This is not a logistics problem in the conventional sense; it is a state-line problem. The mills are placed in Assam, not because Assam has a comparative advantage in bamboo processing, but because the mills were built where they were built for historical industrial-policy reasons that long predate any rational consideration of which side of the state line the raw material lies on.
The second is that the cost penalty for bamboo crossing the Mizoram-Assam border is itself a structural product of the existing arrangement. As reported by Sethi (2007), bamboo from Mizoram has historically been subject to additional entry taxes when crossing into Assam — a cost that is borne by the mahaldars and ultimately reflected in the price they bid for harvest rights, which is in turn reflected in the royalty the state can charge. A processing facility located in Mizoram itself would face no such border tax. The transit cost is a tax artefact, not a transport-cost artefact.
The third is that the National Bamboo Mission, the principal central-government instrument for bamboo development since 2018, has historically allocated its funding overwhelmingly to plantation expansion and farmer-side cultivation support, rather than to processing infrastructure in the Northeast. The 2023–24 Mission allocation of approximately ₹1,290 crore was directed predominantly at plantation establishment, primary processing units at small scale, and skill development; large-scale industrial processing capacity, which is what would be required to retain the value-addition steps within the bamboo-producing states, has not been the priority (Intel Market Research, 2025; Press Information Bureau, 2025). The choice of where Mission funding flows is itself a choice; it could have been made differently.
The fourth is the absence of formal engineering specification for M. baccifera, which excludes the species from precisely the high-value engineered bamboo segment that is growing fastest globally. As the companion essay ‘listening to mautak’ argues, this absence is not a property of the bamboo but a property of the research investment that has not been made. The exclusion of M. baccifera from international engineering registers is, again, a downstream consequence of which research questions have been prioritised, which have not, and where the institutional infrastructure for materials characterisation has been located.
The fifth is the structure of the Mahal System itself. The system was inherited from colonial-era forest administration in Assam and continued, with modifications, after Mizoram’s separation. It rests on the premise that forest produce is best monetised through annual contract-based harvest rights sold to outside specialists, who possess the capital and logistics capacity that local communities are presumed to lack. Whether this premise was ever empirically correct is contestable; whether it is correct in 2026 is straightforwardly false, given the existence of cooperative-ownership models, community forestry rights frameworks under the Forest Rights Act 2006, and the institutional capacity built within Mizoram’s own bureaucracy and civil society over the four decades since statehood.
The persistence of the Mahal System is, therefore, a policy choice and not a historical inevitability. The choice has costs, and the costs accrue to the state, the communities, and the long-term productive capacity of the resource itself.
what would change if it stayed
Counterfactual analysis in development economics is notoriously slippery. It is easy to construct a scenario in which Mizoram’s bamboo value chain is reorganised toward local capture and arrive at very large numbers; it is also easy to underestimate the institutional, capital, and skill-development requirements of any such transition. With those caveats stated, several specific changes are within the realm of plausible policy and do not require speculative assumptions.
A processing facility located within Mizoram, capable of producing bamboo pulp or engineered-bamboo intermediate products at industrial scale, would intercept value addition at the point in the supply chain immediately above the raw culm. Even a single mid-sized engineered-bamboo factory employing five hundred workers and producing intermediate panels at a value-addition margin of three to five times raw-culm price would, on conservative assumptions about throughput, generate annual gross value-added in the range of ₹100–200 crore — substantially more than the state currently receives from the entire bamboo royalty regime. A second or third facility would compound the effect. The capital cost of such facilities is in the ₹50–200 crore range each, well within the scope of central-government Northeast infrastructure programmes if the political priority were to be set.
A reform of the Mahal System to allocate harvest rights to community-level cooperatives, on the model already established under the Forest Rights Act 2006 in other Indian states, would redirect the per-culm margin currently captured by mahaldars to forest-adjacent communities. Even if the royalty rate to the state were unchanged, the local value retention from each harvested culm would multiply substantially. The administrative apparatus required for this transition — community institutions for harvest rights administration, training in sustainable yield management, marketing federations to access downstream buyers — is not exotic; it has been implemented at scale in Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Forest Rights Act in the years since 2006.
A grading and certification regime, anchored to published material-property data for M. baccifera and adjacent species, would allow state-origin bamboo to enter formal supply chains at specification — flooring, structural, instrument-grade, fuel — rather than as undifferentiated raw stock. The price differential between graded engineering-grade culm and ungraded raw culm in international bamboo markets is typically in the range of three to seven times. Establishing this regime requires the foundational characterisation work to be done, the certification framework to be built around it, and the supply-chain partners — architects, designers, builders, manufacturers — to begin specifying M. baccifera by name. Each of these is achievable on a five- to ten-year horizon if the work is started.
A removal or restructuring of the inter-state transit tax burden on Mizoram-origin bamboo, achievable through a combination of state-level negotiation and central-government Goods and Services Tax reform, would close the artificial cost differential that currently disadvantages Mizoram-located processing facilities relative to Assam-located ones.
A redirection of National Bamboo Mission funding toward Northeast Indian processing infrastructure — as opposed to the current allocation pattern that emphasises plantation expansion in already-bamboo-rich regions — would address the principal capital constraint that has prevented industrial-scale processing from emerging in Mizoram and adjacent states.
None of these reforms is technically novel. Each has been proposed, in some form, by the bamboo policy literature over the past two decades. None has been implemented at the scale required.
a closing observation
Sixty-six lakh rupees is a round, knowable, audited number. It is also a small one, in the context of any reasonable assessment of what bamboo is, in a state where the species in question covers nearly a third of the geographical area and forms the foundation of more than one regional industry.
The gap between sixty-six lakh and a thousand crore is not a feature of the bamboo. It is a feature of the institutions that act on the bamboo: the Mahal System that captures the harvest, the mill placements that capture the first processing, the specification gap that excludes the species from the most lucrative downstream segments, the funding pattern of the central scheme that was supposed to address the imbalance, and the absence of processing infrastructure within the state.
Each of these features is, in principle, susceptible to change. Each has been changed in other Indian states for other forest products, under other central or state programmes, with results that the public record can be read. Whether they will be changed in Mizoram, for M. baccifera, in time to reshape the next phase of the species’ productive cycle — the one running from the regeneration after the 2007 mautam through to the next flowering in the mid-2050s — is a question of political priority. The arithmetic, until that priority is set, will continue to produce the ratio above. Sixty-six lakh in. Several thousand crore through the chain. Most of the value moving in the same direction it has been moving for as long as the system has been in place.
The species is not the problem. The accounting is.
references
Department of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of Mizoram (n.d.) Bamboo resources in Mizoram. Available at: forest.mizoram.gov.in/page/bamboo-resources-in-mizoram (accessed November 2025).
Forest Survey of India (2019) India State of Forest Report 2019, Volume II: Mizoram chapter. Dehradun: Forest Survey of India, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
Government of India (2006) The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (Forest Rights Act). New Delhi: Ministry of Tribal Affairs.
Grand View Research (2024) India bamboos market size and outlook, 2025–2030. New York: Grand View Research / Horizon Databook.
India Brand Equity Foundation (2025) ‘India’s green gold: exploring India’s bamboo industry’, IBEF Blog, 27 June. Available at: ibef.org (accessed November 2025).
India Business Trade (2025) ‘India’s bamboo industry: unlocking the green gold opportunity’, India Business and Trade, 18 July. Available at: indiabusinesstrade.in (accessed November 2025).
Intel Market Research (2025) India bamboo fibre market: outlook and forecast 2025–2032. Singapore: Intel Market Research.
Persistence Market Research (2025) Bamboo and bamboo products market size report, 2026–2033. Pune: Persistence Market Research.
Press Information Bureau (2025) ‘National Bamboo Mission: progress and outlook’, PIB Press Release, 29 August. New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. Available at: pib.gov.in (accessed November 2025).
Sethi, N. (2007) ‘Mautak will flower’, Down to Earth, 7 June. Available at: downtoearth.org.in/environment/mautak-will-flower-10279 (accessed November 2025).
Vanlalruati, C., Zarzoliana and Thlanga, S.V.L. (2024) ‘Mizoram forest after India’s independence: bamboo, wild-life and land use’, International Journal of Advanced Research, 12(7), pp. 1041–1047. doi: 10.21474/IJAR01/19147.
the fifth in a continuing series of essays on bamboo, biology, policy and place. companion essays: ‘learning to listen’, ‘the curve and the outlier’, ‘bamboo is not timber’, ‘the mautam paradox’.