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Biodiesel has steadily emerged in the last 6-7 years from a trial production in backyard type pilot plants to full industrial type production and marketing with wide and increasing acceptance by the diesel vehicle industry, the fuel trade, and the end-user in a wide variety of market segments. It is gaining popularity owing to its multitude benefits ranging from energy security, employment generation to low environmental problem and has now emerged as a viable technology option as a biofuel in many countries. As agrarian economy with more than 60 per cent dependent on agriculture sector, India cannot afford diverting the existing agricultural land parcels for the production of biodiesel as is done in Europe and USA. Therefore, the Government of India recommended Jatropha curcas as a biodiesel plant source for developing the biodiesel technology and therefore it was felt critical to ascertain that the cultivation of Jatropha curcas, envisaged as means of energy security especially in the rural India, does not interfere with the food and nutritional security concerns. The effects were visualized more on secondary crops because they were grown more or less in the same parcel of lands, which were competing for cultivation of Jatropha curcas. The concern was that the secondary crops may not able to compete with energy plantation and would thus disappear.
In pursuit of building natural resources assets in rural areas and also towards horizontal expansion of agricultural areas in the wastelands, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India through Department of Space, carried out nationwide wasteland mapping project using satellite based remote sensing data and assessed the wastelands at the national level. Subsequently using such valuable data, Ministry of Rural Development has implemented several wasteland development programmes. Based on this, the Ministry took up 'National Wastelands Updation Mission' project1,2. Using remote sensing of year 2003-2005, it was found that the wastelands have come down to around 56 Mha from 64 Mha in 1998, showing clearly that in 6 to 7 years there has been reduction to the extent of more than 8 Mha in the wastelands3. The National Wastelands Atlas indicates the fact that about 35 Mha of wasteland can be reclaimed and made suitable for cultivation, especially agro-horticulture, coarse gains amongst which secondary crops such as sorghum and maize, biofuel plantation, etc. were prominent. With appropriate interventions, efforts are made to rationalize the land use patterns and address the conflict arising out of food and energy security concerns. Site suitable for secondary crops as well as energy plantations was identified separately and separated out of the culturable waste lands.
Satellite remote sensing based products enable 'wasteland identification' suitable for biofuel cultivation as well as secondary crops. In fact, 6 out of 9 categories of wastelands have been identified as potential areas for Jatropha curcas plantation as well as for extending cultivation of secondary crops. These include gullied and/or ravinous land and upland with or without scrub, shifting cultivation area, degraded land under plantation crops and degraded pastures/grazing land and underutilized degraded notified forest land. According to climatic conditions, and potentiality for plantation, 26 states of Indian Union have been selected for intensive Jatropha curcas plantation throughout the country. All these states put together have 40 million hectares of potential area which could be put to use for expanding diversified agriculture focused on agro-horticulture, coarse grain secondary crops, biofuels, etc. A considerable part has been identified where Jatropha. could be planted without getting into the agricultural land use conflicts especially at the cost of secondary crops4.
It is important to highlight that these activities have been taken up by end-user themselves to find ways towards addressing both food and energy security in rural India and made considerable investments in terms of promoting rural employment, diversified agriculture, soil and water conservation measures. It is also important to highlight such efforts that were based on the objective information from satellite remote sensing leading to harmonization of land uses and to bringing into focus the elements which are suitable for biodiesel plantations as well as growing secondary crops in the reclaimable wastelands.
Written by Sanjay Kumar Srivastava, Regional Adviser, Disaster Risk Reduction Information and Communications Technology and Disaster Risk Reduction Division (IDD), UN-ESCAP, Bangkok, Thailand.
(References available upon request)
1 Government of India, Ministry of Rural Development and National Remote Sensing Agency, 2000. Wasteland Atlas of India.
2 Gautam N.C., Ravi Shankar G., Narasimha Rao K, Nagaraja R, Manoj Raj Saxena, Jayanthi S.C. & Suresh L. S., 2000. Statistical Analysis of Land Use/ Land Cover over India Using Satellite Based Remote Sensing Techniques, Indian Journal of Agricultural Economic Vol. 55, No. 2, April - June 2000.
3 S. K. Srivastava, , C. B. S. Dutt, R. Nagaraja, S. Bandyopadhayay, H. C. Meena Rani, V. S. Hegde and V. Jayaraman, 2004. Strategies for Rural Poverty Alleviation in India: A perspective Based on Remote Sensing and GIS-Based Nationwide Wasteland Mapping, Current Science, Vol 82, No 7, Oct 2004.
4 The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act: Manual for Bharat Nirman Rajiv Gandhi Seva Kendra for Block and Gram Panchayat level, 2010, Ministry of Rural Development, Govt of India. |
