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Tapioca is a crop of economic importance, both as food and feed, and as a raw
material for industrial products. It is considered to be the cheapest source of
carbohydrates among the cereals, tubers and root crops. In India, the yield of fresh tapioca roots
is around 23,200 kg/hectare/year (Khang and Wiktomson, 2000).
Tapioca is a herbaceous or semishrubby perennial, with very large, cylindrical,
tapering, fleshy, yellowish roots, reaching as much as 3 feet long and 6 to 9 inches in
diameter, filled with milky juice. Stems are slender, 5 to 9 feet in height, somewhat woody
below, with a whitish bark, erect, cylindrical, often somewhat zig zag, smooth, purplish
and glaucous, branched above. Leaves are large, spreading alternately on long slender
cylindrical purplish stalks, deciduous just above the base and leaving that as a wart-like,
flat-topped projection from the stem (Colonel Kirtikar and Basu, 1999).
Salinity is a major factor reducing plant growth and productivity throughout the
world. Soil salinity is a serious handicap to successful agriculture all over the arid and
semiarid regions, which constitute about one-third of the total cultivated area in the world.
In the state of Tamil Nadu, nearly 50,000 hectares are either saline or alkaline or
both (Bernstein et al., 1974; and Tanji, 1990). |
