ARTI of Pune wins the Ashden Prize for a system to turn sugar cane leaf
trash into a resource.
The Ashden Award is the greatest prize that exists for innovative work
concerning the environment in the Third World. Dr. A D Karve on behalf
of ARTI, Pune walked up recently to receive the prestigious Rs.20 lakhs
award at a ceremony in the UK. The judges declared themselves as
'excited' about his work - an integrated fuel-from-waste system that can
create thousands of rural entrepreneurs all over the world, while saving
trees and reducing petro dependance. It is a success that took six long
and little sung years in rural Maharashtra.
*_Priya plays with cane leaves:_*
Actually the adventure began with Anand Karve's adoring daughter,
Priyadarshini in 1996. She was looking for a subject to research for her
Master's thesis and chanced upon sugar cane leaves. Is there no use for
this huge waste resource of Maharashtra? It doesn't decompose easily,
cattle has no esteem for it and farmers consider it a disposal problem.
They simply burnt it where it lay - in their fields.
Priya tried shredding and briquetting leaves in general in order to
create fuel pellets. They were intractable. The process cost more in
terms of energy than could be locked in the end product. "The problem is
that leaves are a springy mass and not easily compacted. Cane leaves in
addition contain a high silicate fraction - which is like sand," says
Priya.
Priya's academic pursuits distracted her for a while and there the
matter stood until she finished her doctoral thesis in physics. She came
back to the idea and decided to char the cane leaves. A proposal by her
to try this out got her funding under the Young Scientist Programme of
the Department of Science and technology. By now her father, Anand
Dinkar Karve was beginning to be impressed by Priya's work and the
potential of the idea. A scion of an illustrious family of Maharashtra
given to learning and social activism, Anand Karve is a doctorate in
botany from the university of Tubingen, Germany. After many positions of
'employment' he finally gravitated to his true love: making science and
technology solve India's rural problems. Appropriate Rural Technology
Institute [ARTI] started in 1996 by a group of scientists and workers,
carries out development work on a dizzying variety of projects, funded
by various agencies. Sample these: making tissue culture affordable to
farmers by a post culture multiplication method, an optimising terra
cotta sensor/controller for drip irrigation, a roofless 'green-house'
that is right for India, a low cost method to fabricate carts using
bamboo instead of steel and so on. "He's a restless 65 year old,
bubbling with energy and he can attract and motivate groups of people to
explore new ideas," says Priya. Even as this article is written he is in
far Tripura, [-which incidentally,is noticed by main-media only when
there is trouble there] working among farmers on local problems. "I
haven't seen him after he got the prize. Before I could catch up with
him, he was off to the North East," smiles Priya.
*_Char it!: _*
Back to our story now. The potential was like a mountain that *had* to
be climbed. Maharashtra, India's largest sugar producer, generated an
annual waste of five million tonnes of leaves. If only they could be
made to cook meals in homes, the environment could be protected, trees
and petroleum saved, employment generated and fields cleared.
But the gritty cane leaf stood defiant. Having failed to compact it
mechanically, ARTI decided to char it to produce charcoal. This
seemingly obvious approach had not so far been attempted anywhere. For
equally obvious reasons: unlike wood the traditional candidate for
charcoal, cane leaves present a large surface area per given weight.
Thus the leaves 'burn' rather than 'char'. Many initial attempts by ARTI
failed.
The breakthrough came when they thought of packing the leaves tightly in
a retort [which is really a can with a lid]. Starved of oxygen the
leaves pyrolised and crumbled, yielding charcoal powder. Karves knew now
they could reform the rowdy leaf. Since then, their approach has been to
develop an integrated technology that can trigger hundreds of rural
businesses.
*_A rural business system:_*
The kiln itself was designed to be hand made and small enough for a
farmer's backyard. It was easily top-loaded by removing the hood. The
original steel cans failed frequently. Karve's replaced them with
standard stainless steel lidded cans available throughout rural India. 7
of these could be snugly fitted in the kiln. The cans were densely
packed with leaves to minimise space for oxygen. The fuel to fire the
kiln is also cane trash, burning on a grid below the cans. The narrow
air spaces between the cans force the flue gases to fully work on their
task of heating the cans before escaping to the chimney. And, finally in
a deliciously innovative twist, they put a tiny hole at the bottom of
each can: as the process went on, gases of pyrolysis within the cans
escaped from the bottom, burnt as fuel and helped increase overall
yield. The ARTI kiln today delivers a whopping 27% of input as charcoal
powder.
After a 45 minute firing, the stuff inside the kiln is easily pulverised
with a light roller. To bind the powder, a low cost starch made from
floor sweepings of flour mills is used. To turn out briquettes, the
powder is mixed with starch and extruded using a manual meat
grinder/extruder. Simplicity all the way!
Karves did not end there. Simultaneous, with all this work on kilns,
they were working on a cooking system too: a domestic stove to burn ARTI
charcoal and a double walled family cooker!
Priya says delightedly: "The business is not viable when scaled up: thus
it cannot be hijacked by big business! The moment you start transporting
leaf trash, the costs will get at you. But if a farmer's family sets up
a backyard kiln, they are in business! In the 25-week cane harvest
period, the family can make 15 tonnes of charcoal worth Rs.75000. What's
more, they can also make and sell ovens and cookers." That's tempting
business even by urban standards.
*_Reversed flow:_*
At the yield ARTI has achieved, the revenue works out to about Rs.1000
per tonne of leaf trash. Multiply that by 5 million tonnes for
Maharashtra alone and you get the size of trash gold India is sitting
on. Most of all, all that money will go from urban to rural pockets. And
oops, we forgot the small,incidental matter of saved trees, petro rupees
and the environment! For the ARTI stove user the economics are
attractive. The charcoal is expected to be priced at Rs.7 per kG. For a
typical boiled and steamed Indian meal, a family of 5 can get by using
just 100 gm of ARTI pellets in an ARTI cooker. Frying and grilling could
take a little more but costs still beat kerosene by a ratio of 1:6. The
corner chhaat- and chai- walla may have to drop prices!
And all of ARTI's and Karves' knowledge will remain in public domain.
Their prize money will be spent on fifteen demonstration centres in
Maharashtra and for developing and distributing design, dies and moulds
for making the cookers and stoves. They would also be spreading the idea
and offering training and counseling.
*_Not surprising, really!: _*
A clue to the rare breed of Karves lies in the bearded elder in the
picture alongside. He was born in a once wealthy but then impoverished
family in rural Konkan in 1858. He put himself through education while
working to keep his household going. Widowed early, this brahmin boy
caused a social explosion by marrying a young widow, an act that was to
earn him ostracisation and extreme hardship for several decades. But
that only motivated him to work for the welfare of inhumanly treated
widows of early last century. He founded the first university for women
in India and also a progressive home for widows. He gave over all his
earnings to the causes he believed in and at age 85 was still founding
institutions for public welfare. A grateful India crowned him with
Bharat Rathna and he died, aged 104 in 1962. He was Dhondo Keshava Karve
- affectionately known as Maharshi Karve. Anand Dinkar Karve is his
grandson.
Insufficiently appreciated by many, a perennial stream of Indians has
reached out to fellow men with care and concern for their well being.
It's on that stream's banks that India has survived these 5000 years.
Maharshi Karve's offspring keep that stream in flow.