Project background: 

India is facing multiple severe issues on its economic as well as ecological fronts. 

• Rising fuel imports leading to significant fiscal deficit 
• Poor contribution of the agricultural sector to India’s GDP 
• Enormous land degradation and desertification 
• Growing emissions & climate crisis 

Proposed solution & approach for its implementation: 

Considering the issues being faced, a biomass centered green solution is proposed. It aims to achieve sustainable & country-wide ecological, economy & social benefits. Below are its salient features.

• The solution focuses on restoring India’s degraded lands (mainly agricultural + forest + common lands).
• A systematic approach is proposed to identify a large sized cluster of degraded land (of size ~1000 hectares), prepare it appropriately and cultivate it to develop a 4-F model (Fodder – Fuel – Fruits – Forest) based ecosystem. 
• The 4-F model calls for growing 4 different types of green-covers on the degraded land, in accordance with the local agro-ecological region.
  • Fodder: Growing suitable fodder grasses & post-processing them
  • Fuel: Growing biomass suitable for bio-fuel generation (such as briquettes, ethanol, hydrogen, CBG)
  • Fruits: Growing horticulture to yield fruits and NTFPs
  • Forest: Growing multi-strata native forest 

Benefits and impacts:

The proposed solution would have great positive impacts on economic, social, ecological and climate-actions fronts. 

• Availability of bio-fuel to reduce dependency on fossil-fuels
• Boost to in agri-sector through increase income from agri & allied businesses
• More jobs created in rural parts of India
• Restoration of degraded lands and local natural ecosystem
• More carbon sequestration 
• Opportunity to enable carbon-credits based economy

Project summary:

The project-team is working on the following activities: 

• Analyzing the problems related to degraded lands, fuel-economy & rural development, 
• Building detailed understanding about degraded lands, their usage, soil types, water availability, land-ownership using various available databases
• Building a detailed agro-economical model of the proposed 4F-based solution 
• Carrying out what-if analysis for various cases of the 4F solution (different agro-ecological zones, different land sizes & ownership types)
• Developing policy-recommendation papers for state & central governments 
• Supporting pilot implementations of the 4F framework at multiple locations in association with govt & non-govt associates