The History of Mushroom Cultivation in India

People have been eating mushrooms for a long time. They used to go the forests and other wild places and based on their personal knowledge of edible and poisonous mushrooms they used to collect the edible ones. Even now some people collect wild mushrooms from the forest and eat them. Sometimes they turn out to be poisonous and have harmful effects. In India the “Guchhi” mushroom was a delicacy known to the people prior to the 1950’s. It came mostly from Kashmir.Around the early 1950’s the government of Himachal Pradesh appointed Shri S.S.Jain as its first Asstt. Plant Pathologist and Mycologist for the state. He worked in the Wild Flower Hall in Chharabra, Shimla. He was touring the interior areas of Himachal to help the apple orchardists and the farmers control the diseases of apples, other fruits and crops like potatoes and wheat. He noticed the poor hand to mouth condition of the poor farmers in the hilly state of HP. He wanted to help them.While staying with some farmers in interior areas he noticed that there were rotting twigs and branches of apple and other fruit trees and wheat straw in the barn along with cow dung and in the environmental conditions there were a profusion of mushrooms growing in the dark barns.This led him to think of using the waste material with the farmers for growing edible mushrooms. He searched the literature and found that edible mushrooms were being grown in France and Japan. He made a research proposal on growing of edible mushrooms and got the permission for the same from the state government and obtained the mushroom spawn from Japan and France and started a laboratory in Solan, Shimla Hills and started his research experiments on growing edible mushrooms of Agaricus and other species, in laboratory conditions simulating those found in Himachal Pradesh.When he was able to grow the mushrooms successfully on substrate prepared from rotting apple tree twigs and branches, cow dung and wheat straw etc. he published the results through the magazine of the HP state Extension department. These results when publicized and brought to the notice of the farmers and the poor people people in the state led to dissemination of information and spawn to them and mushroom farming started in Himachal Pradesh.The laboratory established by Shri S.S.Jain, the pioneer of mushroom cultivation in India later became the only important centre for training in mushroom cultivation to farmers of Himachal Pradesh and other states as also the mycologists and plant pathologists from all over India. Mr. Seth and others actually worked with Shri Jain and later became important in the area of mushrooms. But it is a fact that Shri SS Jain in Solan successfully completed the first research project in India. Shri Jain left Solan in 1962-63 for Cuttack.Shri S.S.Jain then became the OSD and set up the first campus and office of the HP Agricultural University in Solan and later joined Central Rice Research Institute,Cuttack Orissa under the ICAR as a Senior Scientist Plant Pathologist and retired from there in 1978 after having published over a hundred research papers and also having been the Chief Editor of the International Rice journal “Oryza”. Shri Jain had also done a monographical study of the Stem Rot disease of rice and also discovered the bacteria Xanthomonas oryzae, which caused the Bacterial Blight disease of rice, and Dr Devdath did his Ph.D on this bacteria and disease. Before Shri Jain expired after prolonged coma in Apollo Hospital Delhi and a small nursing home in Baraut, District Baghpat (Meerut), UP, he had been an award-winning President of the Rotary Club Baraut for his excellent social service work also winning International citation from Rotary.Now the mushroom cultivation in India is something I could not have imagined from what I saw in the laboratory in Solan. I found a huge factory in Maharashtra near Talegaon, Lonavala, where there were huge godowns in a factory where tray upon tray of white beautiful button mushrooms created a sense of wonder and awe in me and I began thinking of the experiments of my father in the small room in Solan way back in the 50’s when I was a student and used to walk to his office nearby and have lunch with him in his laboratory. By chance the Mycologist in that factory turned out to be one who had undergone training in the laboratory established by my father in Solan.Mushroom cultivation has become a huge export oriented industry and large foreign exchange earning business and also profitable for small time growers. Many Universities and State departments of agriculture as also private people are giving training in growing mushrooms, which are mostly, exported and also used in many good hotels in a variety of culinary delights.
– RK Jain
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