Biofuel crops fuel worry

BANGALORE: It might be about time thestate asks how green are biofuels. Karnataka is going to be one of the fewstates to heavily invest in biofuels. It has already covered an area of 13.5lakh ha and the newly-formed Biofuels Board is going to commence operations nextweek. Farmers are being encouraged to plant honge and jatropha, along withregular food crops in a multi-cropping pattern. In the long run, this could meangradual conversion of farmland into biofuel production units."Allover Karnataka, we are encouraging farmers to plant these crops along the bundsand fences in their agricultural lands. These can also be used as a second crop,grown when short-gestation-period crops are harvested. They can also implement amulti-cropping pattern. In the past two years, we have already disseminated onecrore five lakh saplings and these have been planted already," chairman of theKarnataka Biofuels Taskforce Y B Ramakrishna told TOI.A lot of thisplanting activity will happen in the eastern part of Karnataka, including Bidar,Gulbarga, Kolar and others. While according to officials most of the plantinghas happened on wasteland, there's no agency to certify what's a wasteland. Someof these plantations are also being done on forestland."Wastelandsare in barren revenue lands or even forestlands where there is no forest growth.In Davangere for instance, 90,000 ha of forestland hardly has any forest cover.In Gulbarga-Raichur too there is around one 1,80,000 ha of such land,"Ramakrishna added.From being a recommendatory body, now thetaskforce will be converted to a facilitating body that will route funds forprojects from state and central government. Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand havealready constituted biofuel boards.While most view these developments as a step towards minimizing fuel emissions, experts caution major changes in land-use pattern. "There should be very strong regulatory safeguards against massive changes in land use. While the general idea is that biofuels help reduce emissions, it has a significant linkage with land and food production as well. Secondly, whatever biofuels are generated, for which huge tracts of land are being locked up, shouldn't be used to fuel SUVs or private cars. Instead, they should be used in a decentralized way to address energy needs of villages," said associate director of Centre for Science and Environment, Anumita Roychowdhury.RUNNING ON BIOFUELTheKSRTC has been using a combination of biodiesel and diesel and ethanol- blendeddiesel for some of its buses on a trial basis. "We are using ethanol- blendeddiesel for over 1,000 buses and biodiesel-blended diesel for around 200 buses.We have got satisfactory results so far and there's a 20 to 30% reduction infuel emissions," said KSRTC MD Gaurav Gupta.