http://www.indianexpress.com/story/268730.html
Bhandari hits the nail on the head with bio-fuel developmet which is sorely needed. The current fuel pricing and usage has the net effect of blowing a hole in the Indian economy (google Oil Bonds AND India to assess the stupidity of Indian government).
What we need is a mechanism which will create renewable energy and "renewable" jobs. Solar has it's place - but the problem there is it cannot create long-term, sustainable employement for unskilled folks. I would not worry about fuel-planting eating up food planting just yet. You can always subsidise food production at the expense of bio-fuel production. Or better yet - just make people pay a market price for Arab-imported petroleum and a heavy Petro-cess to boot.
This can literally be India's saviour by putting money out of Arabia and into rural India
3 comments:
Laveesh also makes another point that is certainly more important: focusing on increasing agri-productivity.
We have to double or treble the yield of our "farm to fork" (apologies to Mukesh Ambani) systems -- india loses 60% of her agri produce in her nehruvian stalinist-era supply chains.
This has to be fixed, otherwise the wholesale consequence of shifts to cultivation of biofuels will cause a huge food security crisis.
The good news is we can have our cake and eat it too... the bad news is most are asleep on the subject.
I don't know if this's already mentioned here in this blog.
If one could identify the gene network in these plants(say jatropha) that help to make fuel, and by genetic engineering if one could put those genes in some bacteria or yeast and make it express, that will be a very good breakthrough and then we will not have to depend Arabia probably. This has considerable advantage over the conventional biofuels because, the time needed for one jatropha plant to grow and produce fuel is of the order of months while bacterium devides in seconds and one can make probably the gene express often. And of course, we don't need "land" to cultivate it.
I recently heard a talk by a prof from one of the leading univ in the US, where they are focusing on this. I find this more feasible than any other alternative, and probably good for the environment.
@ranjith:
Check this out: Synthetic Genomics
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