Tapping the green gold
By Aakanksha Kumar with inputs by Mr A R Nayeem

Oil-rich trees, sprinkled all over India, have the power to take
India on the road to self-reliance. Meet Prof. U Shrinivasa, who is
spearheading a campaign to popularize these trees as an alternative
to fossil fuel. Read what a tree, besides its usual trappings, can
offer to the farmers and how, for a change, the farmers can be
responsible for plugging the fuel demand-supply gap… read an eye-
opener…

It is difficult to find an optimist, amidst an avalanche of
intimidating reports and scary prophecies about the future. While
predictions about how we are on the verge of an environmental
collapse, courtesy the dwindling resources, unchecked pollution and
rampant industrialization, here is an expert who doles out a simple
solution to manage the rising energy crisis in our country.

Swap fossil fuel with those obtained from trees, if India wants to
save six billion dollars on importing oil, says Prof. U Shrinivasa, a
Mechanical Engineer, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

While India has successfully initiated a shift to crop-based fuel,
using Jatropha trees to make green fuel, a more concerted effort by
the government to promote wild oilseed-bearing species, such as the
Karanj, can wean India's dependence from fossil fuels. This is
because these sturdy tree species grow easily, even in dry conditions
and would be ideally suited for an estimated 70-130 million hectares
of wasteland.


Trees : rekindling hope
India, home to about 300 oilseed-bearing trees, should take up
greening these rural belts, which is a low input and low cost option,
says Prof. Shrinivasa, also the Chief Program Executive, SuTRA
(Sustainable Transformation of Rural Areas). 'In terms of investing
value into a local resource, it amounts to bringing liquidity to an
enormously large dormant asset. Every 10 million hectare equivalent
of tree cover could give us annually 25 million tonnes of diesel
substitute, and 70 million tonnes of cake, which on fermentation can
substitute an equivalent quantity of Indian coal', he explains.

In other words, 30 million-hectare equivalent can completely replace
the current use of fossil fuels, both liquid and solid fuels
renewably, and at costs that India can afford. According to the State
of Forest Report 2001, India's geographical area of about 33 million
hectares already has 8 million hectare recorded forest area and the
country still has 23 million hectares of non-forest area. Another
report points out that India has added about 10 billion trees in the
past 15 years on privately owned lands and, therefore, it should be
able to achieve the projected number quite easily.

SuTRA is a programme unit of the Society for Innovation and
Development, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The SuTRA
technologies empower farmers in semi-arid tropical areas to manage
their local natural resource base in a sustainable way, and find
solutions to problems that they face everyday.

Unlike Europe and North America that are pursuing canola (rapeseed),
an agricultural crop, to generate diesel substitutes (bio-diesels),
SuTRA believes that the Indian wild varieties such as Karanj
(Pongamia pinnata) have a very promising market. 'We have carried out
Karanj plantations in semi-arid areas of Karnataka, and our
experience shows that these trees take care of themselves, and even
cattle such as goats do not graze Karanj saplings', says SuTRA team.

A relevant question will be how long does one need to wait before
these trees show significant output. The reply to this was that
Karanj normally starts yielding in 3 to 4 years. Even though the
output of a young sapling could only be a fraction of that of a
mature tree, if the number of saplings planted per unit of area is
high, the yield per hectare could still be comparable to that from a
mature plantation.

As the plants grow, the weak ones are thinned out providing a supply
of green leaves for composting and green manure. The utility of
Karanj does not end here; the thin sticks can be used to make fences,
act as a windbreaker, and help conserve moisture or can also be used
as fuel for cooking, and for power generation through gasification.

Many of these trees yield 10-15 tonnes of seeds per hectare on
maturing. These oilseeds yield about 25% of oil and 70% of cake and
the technology for extraction is well established in India. The cake
has multiple uses, but on a large-scale, it probably could be used
best in industrial fermenters to produce biogas (methane) and the
sludge produced thereof, can be used as quality fertilizer. This use
can also be extended on a small scale to the villages for local use,
which will add to the assets of farmers.

And, the risk of crop failure? Since the roots of the older trees
penetrate more than 10 m in depth in soil, unlike agricultural crops
which use only 150 mm of top soil, both the survival rate during dry
periods and annual output per hectare of this species are better than
what could be obtained from many agricultural crops. This eliminates
the possibility of total yield failure with trees in any year, Prof.
Shrinivasa adds.

Just like a genie working all the time, needless to say these trees
sequester carbon and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions too. So, will we
be able to let this genie out of the bottle?

A R Nayeem is Manager of Finance and Administration in the Indian
Institute of Science, Bangalore



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