Context

National Innovation Foundation-India (NIF) has recently boosted new varieties of Anthurium. These flowers with high market value, help to purify air are cultivated by a lady innovator from Kerala.

About

• Anthurium(Anthurium spp.) is a vast group of beautiful blooming plants available in a wide range of colors.
• Anthurium is one of the best domestic flowering plants in the world. They are beautiful but also purify the surrounding air and remove harmful airborne chemicals like formaldehyde, ammonia, toluene, xylene, and allergens.
• Its importance of removing toxic substances from the air, NASA has placed it in the list of air purifier plants.
• Anthurium has larger economic importance because of its eye-catching and beautiful inflorescence and fetches a good market price.

The new development:

• D Vasini Bai, a women innovator from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, has developed ten varieties of Anthurium by cross-pollination. 
• The uniqueness of these varieties are large and medium-size flowers with uncommon color combinations of spathe and spadix (light and dark orange, magenta, green and rose color combination, dark red and white colors).
• She has also developed a new method for raising the seedlings in limited space using corrugated asbestos sheets.
• For transplanting grown-up seedlings, she uses concrete troughs instead of pots.
• These methods have helped her in growing more plants in limited space, thus reducing the costs and maintenance and increasing the income at the same time.
• She sells the Anthurium flowers and plants to local florists as well as in cities like Pune and Mumbai at an average price of rupees 60-75 per flower.
  
  

Significant achievements of Vasini Bai: Vasini Bai has received a number of awards and recognition for developing the Anthurium varieties. In 2017, she was awarded with state award at the Ninth National Biennial competition organized by National Innovation Foundation-India (NIF) by the then President of India Shri Pranab Mukherjee. Her interest in developing new Anthurium variety instigated in the late 1970s. In 1980, she manually cross-pollinated for the first time. After years of experiments in 1985, she developed the first variety of Anthurium- Dora (single plant with 8-10 leaves and multiple flowers with orange-colored spathe). She continued her work, and during 1985–2000, she developed another five varieties viz. Dora- I, Dora –II, Dora –III, Dora –IV and Dora – V. The other five varieties Akash, George, Giant Pink, JV Red, and JV Pink were developed later through manual cross-pollination.

National Innovation Foundation (NIF):

• The National Innovation Foundation (NIF) is India's national initiative to strengthen the grassroots technological innovations and outstanding traditional knowledge.
• Its mission is to help India become a creative and knowledge-based society by expanding policy and institutional space for grassroots technological innovators.
• It was set up with the support of Honey Bee Network.
• NIF scouts, supports and spawns' grassroots innovations developed by individuals and local communities in any technological field, helping in human survival without any help from formal sector.