New Delhi: Bamboo has a plethora of utilities, making it the nature's equivalent of a Swiss knife and something that has enriched the Indian lexicon with an evocative - and indelicate - word to describe torment.

Now, it has also become a symbol of liberalisation, an economic concept whose green shoots have been playing hide-and-seek under the Narendra Modi government.

The Union cabinet has decided to amend a 90-year-old law to dismantle a permit raj that has been governing the felling and transit of bamboo grown in non-forest areas, sources said on Wednesday.

Such red tape was in place because of a peculiar classification of bamboo in official records. Bamboo is taxonomically a grass but it is treated as a tree in the Forest Act of 1927. Section 2 (7) of the act has a line that says "'tree' includes palms, bamboos... brush-wood and canes".

The classification means bamboo attracts the requirement of permits if bamboo grown on private land needs to be felled and transported.

Some states had dropped the permit requirements but inter-state movements of bamboo still requires documents. That impediment will also be removed once Parliament incorporates the change approved by the cabinet on Wednesday.

Bamboo is no hollow business. India has the world's largest area under bamboo cultivation and is the second-richest country, measured through bamboo's genetic resources, after China, which was demarcated during the Cold War by the colourful coinage "Bamboo Curtain".

However, the sources said, the full potential of the sector in India has not been realised because cultivators have faced a "restrictive regulatory regime" that required permission for felling, transit, processing and export restrictions.

The amendment, the sources hope, will encourage bamboo plantation by farmers, allow for the free movement of bamboo and ensure that production and consumption centres are "seamlessly integrated".

The sources said the amendment was expected to contribute to Prime Minister Modi's objective of doubling farmers' incomes by 2022.

For such a mission, every bamboo pole counts. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose pioneering liberalisation drive went far beyond bamboo, had said on the first anniversary of demonetisation that in order to double farm incomes in five years, agriculture needed to grow at 14 per cent a year - against the average annual growth rate of 1.8 per cent for the past three years.

The proposed amendment is expected to generate demand and lead to planting of bamboo on non-forest land, provide employment and encourage growth of small and medium industries in villages and smaller towns and reduce India's dependence on timber imports, the sources said.

Bamboo liberalisation has been a work in progress. The sources listed other measures that the government had initiated to "liberalise the bamboo sector".

They have pointed out that the guidelines for wood-based industries have recently been revised to remove bottlenecks for setting up saw mills using bamboo and similar other species grown under agroforestry schemes.

The government has relaxed export rules by removing Muli bamboo from a list of prohibited items into a "free category" till March 2019, the sources said. It has revised rules to allow export of certain products made of bamboo, except bamboo charcoal, bamboo pulp and unprocessed bamboo shoots.