That ad about ordering a single rose on Blinkit? It tells an intriguing story. It's a tale of a digital India, states awash in lucrative blossoms, growing new markets — and a booming, if relatively new, Indian flower industry.
The industrial flower complex in India is only about as old as liberalization.
"We have an ancient bond with flowers, of course. But until the 1990s, the growing was limited to small patches or the backyards of homes," says KV Prasad, director of the Directorate of Floricultural Research (DFR) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Pune.
This was the source of garlands and wedding decorations, wreaths and pooja material. Where they were not available in the volumes required, communities brought them forth in other forms: rangolis and mehendi, sketches and wall art.
Then liberalisation rolled away the barriers to trade. The New Policy on Seed Development had already begun promoting the idea of flowers as a global commodity, in 1988. India has since gone from cultivating flowers across about 35,000 acres in the 1990s to about 783,000 acres today, Prasad says.
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