The Planning Commission hailed it as a future fuel and the industry projected it as a viable biofuel crop. But the Union Rural Development Ministry led by Jairam Ramesh feels otherwise. Citing negative reports, the Ministry has put on hold the Jatropha plantation programme for biofuel purpose. It has thus also put a question mark on the future of the proposed National Mission on biofuels.

The jatropha puzzle has finally been solved.

In 2005-06, most of the districts in the State were abuzz with the talk of jatropha. In press conferences, the then District Collectors, especially in those adjoining western and eastern ghats, talked of largescale jatropa plantations as the oil extracted from its seeds (blended with diesel up to 20 per cent) could be used as a substitute to petroleum diesel.

NEW DELHI: Rapping the rural development ministry's land resources department for the "inordinate delay" in finalising a bio-fuels programme, a parliamentary panel has sought for the matter be placed before the cabinet at the earliest for a decision on its continuance.

Senior European Union officials failed on Wednesday to agree on how to measure the full climate impact of biofuels, prolonging uncertainty in a debate that threatens to wipe out large parts of Europe's biodiesel industry.

The talks followed warnings from scientists that using biodiesel made from European rapeseed and imported palm oil and soybeans does nothing to prevent climate change and could actually accelerate it.

IMPHAL, April 26 – Power-starved Northeast States, including Manipur, should initiate steps to replicate the idea of tapping renewable power as in and around Maharashtra’s Nagpur city. This was shared by almost all the 20 journalists from Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh who recently toured Nagpur to witness the various agro-based power projects and others being taken up by Bharatiya Janata Party national president Nitin Gadkari under his Rs 500-crore Purti Group of companies.

Forest fires and land clearing by palm oil firms could kill off within weeks about 200 orangutans in a forest in western Indonesia, an environmental group said on Wednesday.

The orangutans, part of a population of around 6,600 on Sumatra island, used to live in a lush forest and peatland region called Rawa Tripa on the coast of Indonesia's Aceh province. But more than two-thirds of the area has been divided up into palm oil concessions, said the Coalition to Save Tripa.