Teen ‘Eco Heroes’ Take Biofuel to Mysore Villages
By SUNITA SOHRABJI
Reprinted from indiawest.com
September 07, 2009
High school students Apporva Rangan and Adarsha Shivakumar are helping villagers harvest an alternative to tobacco that is also a rich source of biofuel. (Project Jatropha photo)
Two San Francisco Bay Area teens won Action for Nature’s coveted “Eco Heroes” award Aug. 27 for a project that aims to promote biofuel in Indian villages.
Apoorva Rangan, 14, and Adarsha Shivakumar, 16, both students at College Preparatory School in Oakland, Calif., also won Teens for Planet Earth’s Gold Service Award earlier last month for Project Jatropha, which aims to provide an alternative to growing tobacco to India’s farmers, who would instead grow jatropha, a tree prized for its seed, which contains a rich store of oil that can be used in a variety of ways.
The jatropha plant, native to Central America, has generated worldwide interest as a source of biofuel. Jatropha can grow almost anywhere, in the poorest of soils and the harshest of climates. Several auto manufacturers have looked at the plant’s potential for vehicle use.
The Indian government has signed a decree which aims to reduce tobacco planting by 50 percent by the year 2020, leaving farmers scrambling to find an alternate crop. Tobacco curing currently relies heavily on wood fuel – it takes more than two kilograms of wood to cure one kilogram of tobacco, which has led to rampant deforestation around the country.
In an interview with India-West from their Pleasant Hill, Calif., home, Shivakumar and Rangan, who are siblings in an extended family set-up, enthusiastically discussed their project and their plans to recruit American teenagers to promote the project in other Indian villages.
The seed of the idea began in 2007, on a summer trip back to India. “Our dad took us to a village nearby, and we saw the poverty and degradation of the people living there,” said Shivakumar, noting that the farmers they met had the twin problems of finding alternatives to tobacco and finding fuel to cure their product with. Many in the Hunsur Talak, the village the teens visited, would collect firewood illegally from the Nagarhole national forest.
So Rangan and Shivakumar decided to take action and looked around for a solution to solve both issues. They hit upon the idea of developing a biofuel that could be used to cure tobacco, and also as a cash crop, to eventually replace tobacco.
Biofuels are fuels derived from living material, such as corn or soybeans, and are being considered as an alternative to fossil fuel, which is in short supply.
“We wanted to provide farmers with an economically viable alternative to tobacco,” Shivakumar told India-West.
The pair next received the support of a couple of NGOs and started to buy jatropha seedlings at Rs. 6 each, which they began giving away free to villagers in Hunsur Talak. To date, 55 farmers have started to grow the plant and Project Jatropha has distributed 13,000 seedlings.
The trees take about two to three years to mature, and have a lifespan of of 40 years. Once mature, a single tree can produce about five kilograms of biodiesel, which can be refined and used in automobiles, or used in crude form for fires and powering farm equipment and generators.
Project Jatropha is also teaching villagers in Hunsur Talak about vericomposting, using worms, to harvest a richer yield for their crops.
Over the next five years, Rangan and Shivakumar said they want to get more NRI teens involved in Project Jatropha to promote the scheme in other villages throughout India.
“We’re so proud of them, but we realize that they have a lot of work ahead of them,” Kasturi Shivakumar, Adarsha’s mother, told India-West, adding that the kids have a vision of growing jatropha across India, by recruiting other teens.
Information about Project Jatropha is available at www.projectjatropha.com.
