Bhubaneswar: The Regional Plant Resource Centre, Bhubaneswar, has constructed a specially designed orchidarium at the Botanical Garden for public view of orchid species and hybrids.
Set up at a cost of Rs 73 lakhs with financial aid from the Forest and Environment Department, its aim is to conserve and create awareness among researchers, scientists, students and general public about the diversity, commercial and conservation importance of orchids of India in general and Odisha in particular.
Bikram Keshari Arukha, Minister of Forest & Environment, inaugurated the orchidarium, Friday.
Rebecca Nayar, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF) and Chief Executive of RPRC, which was established in 1985 as a recreational garden, said orchids are the largest family of flowering plants in India. But their population is extremely low since they are restricted to certain geographical areas. Around 73 per cent of them are found atop trees in forests.
She said that plant conservation and research are the main mandate of Bhubaneswar’s Regional Plant Resource Centre, with special emphasis on preservation of plant genetic resources of Odisha.
Besides other groups of plants, RPRC pays special attention to collection and propagation, conservation and reintroduction of wild orchids of Odisha along with research on promising hybrid orchids of commercial importance.
At present, the RPRC which has a collection of 93 wild orchid species and around 217 hybrids collected from Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, North Eastern states among others, focuses on propagation, genetic diversity assessment, conservation and reintroduction of orchids in natural forest habitat of the state.
Orissa is home to about 130 species of orchids and 97 of them are found in Mayurbhanj district, especially at the Similipal Biosphere Reserve. These plants are found in high-rainfall hills in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Gajapati, Rayagada and Kandhamal districts.
In other parts of India, orchids are distributed mostly in the northeast — Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura — apart from Bengal’s Darjeeling district, between altitudes of 300 to 900 metres above sea level. The Western Ghats in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra are also home to many varieties of orchids.
Prasad Kumar Dash, a senior scientist and botanist, said orchids have a sporadic range of distribution, especially in these days when the forest covers are shrinking fast due to increasing human interference and other reasons.