The Energy and Resources Institute have joined hands for India's largest integrated biofuels project. Under this commercial pilot project Jatropha will be planted over 8,000 hectares of wasteland by 2007-08; the sites are located across three districts of Andhra Pradesh. The project will cost an estimated US$ 9.4mn and take around 10 years for full implementation. To date, the project has achieved around 300 ha of Jatropha plantation under different models of plantations viz. block, inter cropping and boundary. Upon maturity these plantations are expected to yield 12 million litres of biofuel. The project will also install all equipment necessary for seed crushing, oil extraction and processing.

The project involves local communities, who are at the front end of the value chain. A training centre is established for capacity building among the farmers for the Jatropha plant maintenance, planting techniques, irrigation and harvesting and for trainers' training.

Key aspect of the project is to gain greater understanding into the social and environmental dimensions of the activity. A five-year social and environmental impact study by independent third party organization is already commissioned. The study will establish baseline data throughout the value chain in both the environmental and social dimensions of the project, which will be monitored over a period of time. This assessment will provide insights into Jatropha as a crop, including generating information necessary to carry out a life cycle analysis of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as looking at key impacts on local livelihoods.

Clearly the involvement of a range of local stakeholders will be critical to the success of the project. This includes not just the local administration, but also local commercial players. At the end of 2006, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with a leading national bank to finance the farmers under a contract-farming model. An innovative 'micro-finance' model has been developed and tested under this project.

It is hoped that the project would not only establish whether the promise of Jathropha holds good when grown at a large scale, but would also provide data to support the creation of sustainability standards for the bio-fuels industry.