Environmental research

Nepal lacks petroleum ore. Rural people use kerosene and diesel for household and farming activities respectively which are imported by utilizing foreign hard currencies. Moreover, government is subsidizing heavily on the prices of petroleum products to supply it on reasonable prices. This situation has created enough backing for searching the alternatives of fossil fuels. With the increasing prices of petroleum products, poor and marginal farmers are facing difficulty in purchasing these products. Researches carried out in Nepal and in other countries have found that seeds of some of the plant species possess high-energy efficiency characteristics i.e. they can be used as bio-diesel after simple processing. Sugar molasses and other biomass materials can also produce ethanol economically. Among such plants, the most popular are Jatropha curcus Pongamia pinnata, and Madhuca indica etc. These crops can be grown extensively with simple technical support as this is one of the endemic plants of Nepal and can be grown in all types of soils. The project proposes to plant jatropha plants in marginalised land such as flood prone area and flood denuded areas and installed community managed bio-diesel extraction unit. It also proposes draw water from perennial water eg. rivers for irrigation to enhance the food productivity.

Nepal