Science and Innovation | IndusLatin

Promoting India Latin America Collaboration

Indian rubber clones a hit with Latin American planters

September 3rd, 2008 Posted in Agriculture, Commodities, India, Mexico, Science and Innovation

The first consignment of saplings developed by Rubber Research Institute of India (RRII) will reach Mexico within a week. Planters in Guatemala too, are in talks with rubber nurseries in India to buy the high-yielding and disease- resistant rubber saplings.

Although rubber was first brought to India more than 100 years ago from Brazil, recent efforts to cultivate rubber commercially in Latin America did not take off due to the recurrence of diseases like leaf blight.

“It was after studying the pros and cons of various new clones that the delegation of Mexican farmers made its first order,” Augustine Thomas, who runs Kuttiyangal Nursery in Pala, central Kerala, told FE. Apparently, the South American farmers have not tried any rubber sapling other than their own indigenous varieties.

According to the RRII, India’s RRII-105 clone (rubber sapling) is not only disease-resistant, but also gives atleast 32% more latex than conventional varieties.

Popularity: 4% [?]

CSIR, Godavari Sugar to set up India’s first sugar cane biorefinery

September 2nd, 2008 Posted in Agriculture, Energy, India, Science and Innovation

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livemint

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR, has teamed up with Karnataka-based The Godavari Sugar Mills Ltd, or GSML, to set up the country’s first biorefinery to convert crushed sugar cane into industrial raw materials such as cellulose and lignin.

Waste management: The biorefinery at GSML will be equipped to produce ethanol from bagasse, the fibre left after the juice has been squeezed out of sugar cane, though the technology is still at a preliminary stage.

The biorefinery at GSML will be equipped to produce ethanol from bagasse, the fibre left after the juice has been squeezed out of sugar cane, though the technology is still at a preliminary stage. Photograph: Ramesh Pathania / Mint
Cellulose and lignin are extensively used in the pharmaceutical, textile and food preservatives industries.

The biorefinery at GSML, part of the Somaiya Group, will be equipped to produce ethanol from bagasse, the fibre left over after the juice has been squeezed out of sugar cane, though the technology is still at a preliminary stage.

“We believe that once scaled up to commercial levels, there will be international interest in the cellulose we’re able to manufacture because the costs will be extremely competitive,” said Samir Somaiya, director, GSML.

Countries such as Brazil and the US have successfully tapped
commercial grade ethanol from sugar cane juice and maize, respectively.
But they involve utilizing the starchy, or food component of these
crops, to extract ethanol.

The private sector in the country,
too, is eyeing opportunities in bio-refineries and cellulosic ethanol
(ethanol from agricultural waste) market. Srinivas Kilambi, director at
Reliance Industries Ltd, had in a 2006 presentation at a renewable
energy conference, outlined plans for a corn-based biorefinery,
(modelled on the US approach for using maize waste).

Popularity: 3% [?]

Raising Water Productivity

August 31st, 2008 Posted in Agriculture, India, Public Policy, Science and Innovation

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Earth Policy Institute: Sustainablog

With water shortages emerging as a constraint on food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity during the last half of the twentieth century. Worldwide, average irrigation water productivity is now roughly 1 kilogram of grain per ton of water used. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, it is not surprising that 70 percent of world water use is devoted to irrigation. Thus, raising irrigation efficiency is central to raising water productivity overall.

In surface water projects—that is, dams that deliver water to farmers through a network of canals—crop usage of irrigation water never reaches 100 percent simply because some irrigation water evaporates, some percolates downward, and some runs off. Water policy analysts Sandra Postel and Amy Vickers found that “surface water irrigation efficiency ranges between 25 and 40 percent in India, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand; between 40 and 45 percent in Malaysia and Morocco; and between 50 and 60 percent in Israel, Japan, and Taiwan.” Irrigation water efficiency is affected not only by the type and condition of irrigation systems but also by soil type, temperature, and humidity. In hot arid regions, the evaporation of irrigation water is far higher than in cooler humid regions.

Raising irrigation water efficiency typically means shifting from the
less efficient flood or furrow system to overhead sprinklers or drip
irrigation, the gold standard of irrigation efficiency. Switching from
flood or furrow to low-pressure sprinkler systems reduces water use by
an estimated 30 percent, while switching to drip irrigation typically
cuts water use in half. A drip system also raises yields because it
provides a steady supply of water with minimal losses to evaporation.
Since drip systems are both labor-intensive and water-efficient, they
are well suited to countries with a surplus of labor and a shortage of
water.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Caterpillar Inc. Funds Viterbi ‘Print-a-House’ Contour Crafting Technology

August 27th, 2008 Posted in Infrastructure, Science and Innovation

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Wonder what the error message would read like “Machine is out of concrete. Your house could not be printed.”
Next Big Future:

Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, is starting to support research on the “Contour Crafting” automated construction system that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours. This is concrete-jet instead of inkjet printing technology.

Printing buildings to speed up the economy is one of the key technologies for this sites concept of a mundane technological singularity

The current state of the art is printing concrete walls.

Printing buildings is a key part of new manufacturing and construction revolution.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Answers to questions a resurgent India seeks!

August 24th, 2008 Posted in India, Philosophy and Culture, Science and Innovation

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- Corporate Dossier-Features-The Economic Times

Indian youth have a huge amount of dissatisfaction, hopefully a divine discontent , and they can change things around. They have three strengths: first, persistence, second, innovation, and third, happiness. These are distinctive and are rooted in our history and genes.

PERSISTENT INDIA

Two anecdotes exemplify this:

Ramesh, a tea boy in Shahjehanpur, UP, once insisted on conversing in English. “I want to practice with you and pass TOEFL, so that I can go to America. 500 English words are enough to pass TOEFL,” he said with a ‘can-do’ look on his face.

In Mithapur, Gujarat, I asked Arvind Chudasama, a micro-entrepreneur , supported by a Tata Chemicals outreach activity, about the state of his ice cream business. Bad, he replied. Power cuts. So what about his loan? “I took a second loan to buy a chakda (like a jugad, intervillage transport contraption). I make enough to repay the loan and to invest in a battery to power the ice cream machine ,” he said, full of confidence.

Living in India is like running an obstacle race. One is overcoming obstacles , every day and all the time – poor schools, crowded cities, corrupt officials , unhelpful agents of governance. Indians have the freedom of democracy but not the liberty that is supposed to accompany democracy.

Only when common people can get ordinary, day-to-day things done without a hassle can we say that Indians have the liberty of democracy. “In India, democracy is flourishing, liberty is not,” to borrow from Fareed Zakaria’s comment (The Future of Freedom ). But let us not despair, these things take time. 80 years after the Declaration of Independence, the US was fighting a civil war. Our democracy is maturing. In the meanwhile, the never-say-die and can-do spirit of Indians like Ramesh and Arvind Chudasama holds great hope for the future. Persistent India.

INNOVATIVE INDIA

Indians solve problems. Indians are entrepreneurial in their genes and through their history. They are restless, constantly seeking new ways of doing things. They can be almost exasperating in this respect.

Dharnidhar Mahato (Balakdih, Bengal ) developed a Rs. 500/- cycle pedal paddy thrasher, which costs one-fifth and produced twice the output of a regular thrasher. Arindam Chattopadhyay (Bankura, Bengal) developed a single finger pen so that the handicapped could write (Ref: Honey Bee, National Innovation Foundation, March 2008).

The message is that India can innovate big-time like the Param and Eka supercomputers , the Nano car and the offshore software delivery model. Indians have also democratised innovations like the cycle pedal paddy thrasher and single finger pen.

For innovation to be valuable, there has to be ambition. The ambition of young Indians has increased, so the innovative spirit is poised to deliver big time. Innovative India.

HAPPY INDIA

JRD Tata once said, “I do not want India to be an economic super-power . I want India to be happy.”
The MTV Networks International published a well-being index, according to which ”young Indians are the happiest people on the planet” . Among people in the age group of 16-34 , Indians reported 60% happiness, at about the top end along with Argentina which was 70%. Guess who was miserable at the lower end? Japan at 8% and America at 30%.

Kelly Services, a Fortune 500 staffing leader company found that Indians ranked first in Asia-Pacific in employee satisfaction and seventh out of 28 countries globally, with Denmark, Mexico and Sweden at the top and, Hungary, Russia and Turkey at the bottom.

The Vedanta says that instead of searching for happiness outside of oneself, one should look for infinite joy and peace within oneself.

Here is the story of a happy Indian from modern times.

A young man, who was working in the Indian Army, could not find meaning in his life. So he decided to commit suicide. He chanced on an inspiring book by Swami Vivekananda. He took premature retirement from the army, collected Rs 65,000, and returned to his village in Maharashtra. He used the money to repair the village well, to close down liquor outlets and to mobilise the villagers to work for their own development . In a few years, his village was proclaimed a model village and he found a new meaning in life.

The name of the village is Ralegaon Siddhi, and the man who put it on the national map is Anna Hazare, who was decorated with a Padma Bhushan for his pioneering work. He found happiness within himself. The sheer adventure and scale of India’s economic growth, with social justice and entrepreneurship as its pillars, is staggering. There are beauty spots in this model and there are warts and moles, too.

This much is beyond doubt: no experiment of balancing growth, entrepreneurship and social justice has been undertaken in human history by any country on such a large canvas. Over the coming decades, India has the real chance of reclaiming its place at the top table in the League of Nations, a position she held for centuries but lost in the last few hundred years.

Popularity: 1% [?]

India’s gift to green drive: Bicycle @ 40kmph

August 3rd, 2008 Posted in India, Science and Innovation

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Image via Wikipedia

The Economic Times.

India could soon take pride for reinventing the wheel and leading the global green movement! An innovation by a senior administrator at IIT-Kharagpur is helping him ride the humble bicycle at 40 km an hour and pedalling past motor vehicles on busy roads without much effort. And you could be next — cycle manufacturers are planning to launch these hot wheels commercially, very soon.

Manoj Mondal is the inventor of the crank pedal—he successfully tweaked the pedal of a bicycle to an extent that it generates almost double the torque (force multiplied by the distance from the centre) than in normal circumstances . In other words, the speed of the bicycle increases from, say, 20 km/hr to 40 km/hr.

His feat has already made him the toast of incubators , the green lobby and a host of companies which are coming forward to adapt Mondal’s technology commercially. While the invention ushers in revolutionary intra-city commute, it cocks a snook at the fuel brigade as the inventor apprehends auto majors may just gang up to disembark his plans.

Popularity: 1% [?]