NATIONAL
The first-ever ‘Lavender Festival’ was inaugurated in the valley Bhaderwah by the Union Minister of Science and Technology. Bhaderwah (also Bhaderwah Valley) is a town, tehsil and sub-division in the district Doda of Jammu.
Along with this, six distillation units under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM) for lavender was also inaugurated.
The festival was inaugurated in Bhaderwah as it is the birthplace of India's Purple Revolution. The place is the best example of the development of the present progressive government at the centre and has the potential to develop as the destination of agri-tech startups of the country.
India’s first National Institute of High Altitude Medicine is also being built in Bhaderwah, which will attract scholars and researchers from India and also across the globe generating employment opportunities for the region. The lavender cultivation, generates employment for 5,000 farmers.
In the inaugural ceremony, about three MoUs were signed between CSIR-IIIM Jammu with Agro Voltic Power, Mussoorie Uttarakhand, Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar Punjab and Fine Fragrance Power Limited, Mumbai.
Lavandula (common name lavender) is a genus of 47 known species of flowering plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae. The flowers may be blue, violet or lilac in the wild species, occasionally blackish purple or yellowish.