In 1996 an NGO bet a farming village on bamboo, and Thrikkaipetta became the bamboo village

Twenty-one kilometres east of Vythiri, past Kalpetta and off the Meppadi road, the village of Thrikkaipetta has spent nearly three decades answering a question most of Wayanad is still asking: what does a farm village live on when the crop economy stops paying? Its answer — arrived at deliberately, and earlier than almost anywhere else in Kerala — was a grass.

The study centre that stayed

URAVU — formally the Uravu Indigenous Science & Technology Study Centre — was founded in 1996 as a not-for-profit working on sustainable development, and it planted itself in Thrikkaipetta rather than in a city office. Its bet was end-to-end bamboo: nurseries to grow it, training to work it, a design and production centre to sell it, and a village around all three. The organisation’s account, and Kerala Tourism’s own article on the village, put the result at around 200 families in Wayanad finding a livelihood through its bamboo initiatives — many of them women, who make up much of the workshop floor — and from about 2006 the village itself began to be developed and described as a bamboo village, a name that has stuck in everything written about it since.

What that looks like on the ground is unglamorous and worth seeing precisely for that. The workshop turns bamboo into blinds, lampshades, baskets, tableware and building components; the nursery raises planting stock; training batches come through from other districts and states; and the houses of the village increasingly carry bamboo in their own construction. A craft that tourist Kerala mostly presents as an ancestral survival is here a working modern industry with order books.

Visiting a workplace

Thrikkaipetta welcomes visitors, and a responsible-tourism listing for the experience holds a place on our town page — but the visit is to a workplace, and the etiquette follows from that. The workshop is the heart of it: watch the splitting and weaving, ask questions, and buy from the outlet, because the purchases are the point. Around the village there are walks through the bamboo groves and, if arranged ahead, craft sessions where you work a piece yourself. An eco-resort built substantially of bamboo has grown out of the same movement, for those who want to stay rather than day-trip.

The drive from Vythiri takes about half an hour via Kalpetta, and the honest way to schedule it is as a half-day with lunch on the Kalpetta side, paired with the town’s own errands — this is the direction the banks, the big market and the district offices are in anyway. Go in the morning if you want the workshop at full work; it is a working week there, not a show timed to tourist arrivals.