IT vs Algae 3
Narayan murthy of Infosys, Ram of Tata Consultancy, Premji of Wipro and many other software pioners, proved that the demographic strength of India is educated youth of India who can write code.Essentially all that they did is outsourcing work from the expensive developed countries - and used one of the major strength of India - educated youth with an attitude to write code.
India has a population of 1200 million.
37 % of them are Below poverty level.
That is their income is below Rs 20 per day.
Leaving aside the 30 % of the above as below 18 years, one still has about 300 million.
As per one of my earlier blog, it is possible to give them money for algae grown and about Rs 20 per day.
If we can work on cultivating a specific strain which can result in a nutraceutical ( normally high priced) and the resultant algae for a biomass plant, it can be called a Green Revolution of the algae kind.
Demographics is always a strength. it is time to prove that 300 million people can grow algae at home and it can be collected and nutrients extracted and the left over can be used as biomass for a power plant.
Ofcourse some math is to be done.
Manohar
Wed April 28 2010 04:11:29 AM by Manohar
1229 views
Yes, we have to plan it , put more heads into this...... Join hands and brains .. And anything done systematically with proper plan, has high chances of acceptance and bound to succeed......
This sounds like a good idea, but, I think that there is a lot of research that has to be done before you can think of commercialization. The two greatest challenge with algae is the mass transfer of CO2 and light transfer to each and every cell.
We can make 300 million people to grow it, but, all efforts will go waste if we don't have an conversion technology efficient enough for production of nutraceuticals, biodiesel or any other products.
The idea that you have proposed is common with the milk industry and is a great success. So, I think your idea will work good, but, what is more necessary is to develop a technology first.
Jus doing a bit of math...Let's say the 300 million people each cultivate 3 Kg of algae biomass (dry) per day. That could be a price of say about 20 Rs a Kg (just a guess, if the price of biodiesel needs to be 50 Rs, @ 40% oil content, the price of biomass cannot be much more than Rs 20, even taking into account a small price for the algae cake, which is currently about Rs 5 per Kg.).
So, each person earns Rs 60 a day, say Rs 50 nett after any costs attached. That's Rs 1500 a month, not a bad sum of money for the BPL
3 kg of biomass will give about 1 Kg of oil. That's 300 million Kg of oil per day.
India uses about 120 million T of oil per year (all hydrocarbon liquid fuel together - diesel gasoline furnace oil ...) = about 0.3 million T of oil per day = 300 million Kg of oil per day
QED
Nice math, don't you agree!
Ah, some might call this self-fulfilling equation, but there it is.