On its own Steam – A Success Story – The Sunday Express, Mumbai, 1^st October, 2006

A Village called ladwa, a few km off Hissar in Haryana, and a small gaushala located on the dusty dirt tract leading to it, look indistinguishable from millions of other villages in the country. But that’s only as long as you allow yourself to be taken in by appearances. The ladwa gaushala is playing a unique role in the biodiesel story that slowly unspooling across various parts of India: The village is the first India to make large scale use of jatropha fuel.

With 100 acres of land in the village under jatropha curcas, the villager now runs their tractors on fuel extracted from its seeds. Gaushala workers supervise the cultivation and help the locals process the Jatropha seeds.

“We have some 800 jatropha trees here on a collective unit of land put together by some 90-100 farmers. The villagers who own the land also take care of cultivation needs while we supervise and keep a check on the plant’s  health”, says kulwant  Singh, secretary, Vishwa Bharti  kisan  Jagriti Sikshan Sansthan , which operates at gaushala . “We have a tie – up with an oil – milling unit in adjoining kanwari Village, Where jatropha seeds are crushed to extract raw oil, which is then filtered and put to use”.

Kulwant Singh is among the 8-10 farmers from Punjab and Haryana who took special training in Jatropha plantation and biodiesel extraction from the Delhi College of Engineering in December 2004. Close to two years later, farmers he has trained produce 1,000 litres of biodiesel a years and some 150 quintal of jatropha seeds , some for sowing and the rest for selling . Monthly earnings from jatropha seeds, oil and waste products are estimated at Rs.2, 000 per acre, not to mention the fuel that runs the tractors. Not bad for land once dismissed as barren.

“Jatropha is easy to glow, is never eaten by animals, requires very little maintenance and is ideal for multi-tier farming. In a year’s time the plant grows big enough to yield oil.  After the results we have seen, we have been spreading the word about jatropha. At present, we have teams in Barmer and Bikaner in Rajasthan and in unnao, uttar Pradesh, to teach farmers how jatropha can change their lives”, say Singh.

We are also trying to grow jatropha in Baisi Village near Rohtak where the land is extremely barren, and the results have been good so far. If jatropha grows in that patch of Land, it will be a major development, since farmers here normally have to sell off land after it ceases to be productive,” Singh says.

Jai Singh, another farmer involved with the project, says their experience indicates that biodiesel is the next big thing. “We have not only run tractors on biodiesel but also some of the Gaushala vehicles. What’s more, haryana State Transport recently operated a bus on biodiesel. Biodiesel costs much less than diesel is non –polluting and increases the efficiency of vehicles and engine age as it highly lubricated. We are now trying to get a Biodiesel reactor for the village to ensure proper processing of the extracted oil,” Jai Singh says.

The Delhi College of Engineering’s biodiesel research wing is set to take up the reactor issues with the reactor issue with the Petroleum Conservation Research Association (PC RA).

“The Villages have done very good work, but since they don’t have a reactor, they have to run their vehicles on raw oil. With the reactor in place, they will also be able to extract Glycerine , a byproduct that can be sold in the market. We will soon take up the issue with PCRA so that some kind of funding can be made available to them,” say Naveen Kumar, who heads the research wing at DCE.