Unprocessed asafoetida in a jar. Photo: Toyah/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
New Delhi: A group of scientists from the Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (IHBT), Palampur, announced last week that they had planted 800 saplings of Ferula asafoetida, a natural medicine and an integral part of Indian cuisine, in the cold desert areas of Lahaul and Spiti, according to a report in The Hindu.
This marks the first time that the spice – among the most sought after condiments – is being grown in India.
The spice is extracted from the fleshy roots of the perennial ferula as an oleo-gum resin. It adds a zing to Indian vegetarian dishes and enhances the flavour in roasted meat dishes. While in the West the spice is often called ‘devil’s dung’ or ‘food of the devils’, because of its pungent smell, in India it is commonly known as hing in Hindi and perungayam in Tamil.
India imports about 1,540 tonnes of raw asafoetida every year from Afghanistan, Iran and Uzbekistan, for about Rs 942 crore. “It is important for India to become self-sufficient in hing production,” Sanjay Kumar, the director of IHBT, which is a laboratory of the Council for Science and Industrial Research (CSIR), told The Hindu.
Kumar planted the first ferula seedling on October 15 in a field in Kwaring village, Lahaul valley. He said the idea came to his team while travelling to the cold desert regions of Lahoul and Spiti, in the northern reaches of Himachal Pradesh, for their work in agriculture. They found that farmers were only growing potatoes and peas, which did not generate sufficient income, prompting many people to leave villages and find work in cities.
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“We talked about what new crops could be introduced to help boost farmers’ livelihood and that was the eureka moment – why not hing because it grows in exactly the same kind of cold desert regions of Afghanistan and Iran,” Kumar told The Guardian.
Through its plantation drive, IHBT now hopes to help India reduce its reliance on imports of raw asafoetida. The institute used seeds imported from Iran in 2018 and raised the plants at a research centre, under the supervision of the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources.
Cold areas like Ladakh and parts of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh are suitable for cultivating hing. It thrives in dry soil in temperatures under 35º C. IHBT expects it will be about five years before the valuable resin first becomes available.
“We are confident it will work,” Ashok Kumar, a scientist who helped germinate the seeds in a lab, told BBC. He added that for every hundred seeds or so, only two sprout. The plant “goes to sleep to adapt to harsh conditions,” he said.
The two types of resin available in the market are hing kabuli sufaid – milky white asafoetida, which is water-soluble – and hing lal – red asafoetida, which is oil-soluble.
On the question of cultivation costs and net returns, Kumar told the Times of India, “It’ll cost farmers nearly Rs 3 lakh per hectare over the next five years and give them a net return of minimum Rs 10 lakh from the fifth year onwards. We will in collaboration with state government provide support to farmers with finance and technical know-how.”
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“It will be cultivated in a staggered manner so that farmers in certain areas would start getting its benefit from fifth years onward before its expansion to more and more areas in Himachal Pradesh and subsequently in cold desert areas of other Himalayan states/UT,” Kumar added.
PC Perungayam, which has branches in Kerala and Karnataka, is one of India’s many family-run businesses specialised in processing asafoetida. “The price of asafoetida fluctuates during the ban on resin collection every two years in the countries of origin,” C.J. Shankar, an employee of the company, told The Hindu. “Processing units have to adjust to market vagaries. While a kilo of asafoetida used to cost around Rs 200 during my grandfather’s time, it has now gone up to Rs 10,000-15,000 today.”
The company imports asafoetida from Afghanistan and Uzbekistan as pellets, then dilutes them in drinking water and then filters it down to a powdery concentrate with the help of cloth and steel mesh-sieves. “Twenty kg of high quality resin paste can yield up to 500 kg of asafoetida powder,” according to him.