Wild jatropha stirs hope of biodiesel bounty

Firms are contracting villagers to grow the hardy, oil-rich plant.

Hari Ramachandran
Malegaon

The glow from burning jatropha seed torches has often saved Maruti Chindu
from treading on snakes, but now he carefully nurtures them for a use that
he never imagined before - running cars and trucks.

On the hilly grasslands of Maharashtra, near the village of Malegaon, Chindu
and his tribe of some 40 men and women busily plant jatropha saplings. The
saplings are expected to bear seed in three to four years, one of dozens of
new biodiesel projects being planned by private firms to feed the nation's
galloping energy needs.

Once the trees start bearing seeds, they will continue the yields for the
next 30 years without a break. "When electricity came to our village eight,
10 years ago, everybody just forgot about the jatropha trees," said Chindu.
"We could not believe our ears when people offered to pay us to cultivate
jatropha trees on our lands," he added.

In anticipation of the rapidly evolving biofuels market, dozens of private
firms are contracting villagers to grow the hardy, oil-rich plant in their
mostly barren plots of land. In the past, the tribes - who have suffered
caste discrimination for years - would randomly pluck the fat, green seeds
of the jatropha and set them on bamboo spikes to make torches. But now they
treat the plant almost reverentially.

India plans to replace around five per cent of its current 40 million tonnes
of annual diesel consumption with jatropha biodiesel within about five
years. Nearly half a dozen states have set aside a total of 1.72 million
hectares of land for jatropha cultivation and small quantities of the oil
were already being sold to industry. However, it might take around four
years until jatropha fuel is sold at the pump, said a senior government
official. (Reuters)

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