Goodbye tea, welcome jatropha

A silent revolution is creeping up the hills of the Northeast, upstaging an industry that has over the years become synonymous with the region.

A silent revolution is creeping up the hills of the Northeast, upstaging an industry that has over the years become synonymous with the region. As tea industry shows signs of ageing and depleting profits, the upstart jatropha, a rich source of bio-fuel, has quietly made inroads to provide fresh avenues for profits.

So while farmers across the Northeastern states have found in jatropha a new source of enhancing their incomes, tea major Williamson Magor has joined hands with D1 Oils PLC, a UK-based bio-fuel firm, to promote jatropha cultivation in 45,000 hectares aross the region in the past couple of years.

8220;Normally, jatropha plants yield seeds only after the second year. But in the Northeast, we have found that the climate has helped the plants yield seeds much before the expected period,8221; said Kaushik Saikia, chief project manager of the D1 Oil operations in the country.

Tripura, which has emerged as a major producer of rubber in the country after Kerala, has also proved a good place for jatropha cultivation with about 15,000 hectares already under the new cash crop, according to Saikia. 8220;Assam is second with about 14,000 hectares, while farmers in Nagaland too have shown tremendous interest in jatropha,8221; says Saikia. 8220;We had never thought that bio-diesel could be produced from jatropha. We have been using it for a long time only for erecting fences around our fields, but were introduced to its potential by the Agriculture Department and D1 Oil,8221; said Hacto Wotsa, a farmer in Nagaland.

Wotsa, a resident of Pishikhu village in Dimapur district, is among the 8,000 farmers in the tribal state who have taken to jatropha in their wastelands since April this year. 8220;We have been provided free saplings with the assurance that the company would buy back the seeds produced in our farms,8221; said the farmer who is hoping to double his income next year.

While others like Hevelie Shohe, an entrepreneur from Lothavi village, has also taken up jatropha cultivation in one hectare and expects to hike her income by about Rs 15,000 a year, Zingchar Bio-Initiatives Private Limited, a local firm backed by D1 Oil, has offered a 100 per cent buy-back guarantee to 3,800 jhum cultivators of Nagaland and Manipur to take up jatropha as an alternative crop to help them overcome poverty and backwardness.

The Northeastern region has many wastelands, especially in the hill states, where tribal farmers abandon their farms after two or three successive years of jhum slash-and-burn cultivation. Several governments have been experimenting for some time to wean away the farmers from jhum cultivation, and jatropha looks like a feasible formula that could bring about a change of mindset.

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Jatropha cultivation received the biggest boost in the region last year, when the then President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam inaugurated a two-day workshop on bio-diesel in Guwahati and called upon the scientific community to select the best genotypes of jatropha germplasm.

Meanwhile, the R038;D Centre of the North East Development Finance Corporation NEDFi at Khetri is working to identify and develop high-yielding varieties of jatropha from the existing germplasm resource of the region. 8220;We are also working with IIT, Guwahati, while a bio-diesel extraction plant is being set up at Khetri,8221; said Debarshi Bhattacharyya of NEDFi.