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Dear Stovers,
there were many congratulatory messages from members of the
Stoves List and many also wanted to know details of the prize winning
project. I thank all the well wishers for the congratulatory
messages and give below a summary of the project submitted by us for the
award.
The Ashen Award is presented every year to a project
utilising a renewable source of energy for the good of the society. The
other conditions of the award are that the work should be innovative, that it
should have been conducted in a developing country, that the renewable energy
should be used in an environmentally non-polluting manner, either in education,
or in promoting health or for increasing the income of the poor people in that
country.
The project submitted by us was based on the use of dry
sugarcane leaves, that are left in the field after harvesting sugarcane.
Maharashtra, the state in India, where we operate, has 450,000 hectares under
sugarcane. Each hectare produces 10 tonnes of dry leaves. Being
highly silicified, lignified and devoid of any nutritive elements, they cannot
be used as cattle fodder. The leaves are about a meter long and they form
a layer almost 20 to 30 cm thick in the field. If left in the field, they take
almost a year to rot, and therefore they interfere with agricultural operations
like ploughing, irrigation, fertilizer application, etc. In order to get rid of
them, farmers just burn them in the field itself. In this way about 4.5
million tonnes of biomass are burnt in a highly polluting manner in
the open fields. We developed an oven and retort type of kiln for charring
this biomass. The unit is very small. All the operations are manual,
ideally requiring a team of three perons to conduct them. By working
from sunrise to sunset, they would be able to produce about 100 kg char, which
can be turned into char briquettes by using an extruder. In a period of 25
weeks, during which sugarcane is harvested, a family can make about 15 tonnes of
briquettes, which would earn them an income of about Rs. 75,000, which is
comparable to that of a white collar worker in a city. The briquettes
would be used by the urban poor. The Government of India had so far
deliberately made cheap and highly subsidised kerosene available to city
dwellers in order to wean them away from wood and charcoal. But this
subsidy has now been withdrawn, so that kerosene that was available for Rs. 4
per litre costs nowadays Rs. 12 per litre. We have developed a stove and
cooker system, which is so fuel efficient, that just 100 g briquettes are
sufficient to cook rice, vegetables and beans for a family of 5. Considering all
the cooking that the family does, it is estimated that it would require about
400 to 500 g of fuel briquettes per day. Our present survey shows that the
family currently uses about a litre of kerosene every day. The cost of the
briquettes would be about Rs. 7 per kg. It was a project that satisfied
all the conditions of the Ashden Award, and in which all the technological
problems had been solved, all numerical data about the availability of the
biomass, output of briquettes, its economic impact on the rural economy and its
benefit to the rural poor were quantifiable.
This work was initiated by my daughter, Dr. Priyadarshini
Karve, in 1997 under a research grant from the Ministry of Science and
Technology, Government of India. Her origin kiln contained only one retort,
and it was made of mild steel. After her project period of two years
was over, other workers in the Institute carried on the work to develop it into
a commercially viable unit containing 7 retorts made of stainless steel. The
prize money would now be used to set up 10 demonstration-cum-training units in
10 sugarcane growing districts of Maharashtra State. In addition, we shall make
dies to mass produce the cooker-and-stove assembly, and appoint extension
workers, who would give demonstration of the cooking device in the poorer
quarters of large cities.
A.D.Karve
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