IIM-A professor wins World Bank award

A greenhouse technology for arid areas pioneered by a management professor has won the World Bank's Global Development Marketplace 2005 award.

Professor Girja Sharan of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad developed the arid area greenhouse (AAG) technology which is useful for cultivation in hot and arid regions such as Kutch where water is very scarce, soil is saline and temperatures high.

Sharan is a faculty of the Centre for Management in Agriculture at IIMA. A distinctive feature of AAG is that it uses what is called an "earth tube heat exchanger or ETHE" for cooling and heating the ambient air in greenhouses.

The Cummins-IIMA Laboratory of Environmental Technologies founded by Sharan at the B-school will patent the technology.

Apart from commercially marketing the technology to farmers in the arid areas of the state, the institution has also decided to sell it to entrepreneurs for further development.

"There is little scope for improvement of agriculture in Kutch if one insists on open field cultivation. The only sustainable way for agricultural growth in an arid region is greenhouse technology. The ETHE method of cooling or warming ambient air is used, perhaps, for the first time in India," said Sharan, while speaking to newspersons at IIM-A on Wednesday.

ETHE is a device that enables transfer of heat from ambient air to the deeper layers of the soil (in this case, to a depth of three metres).

Air is pumped into pipes that are laid horizontally in the soil and is cooled to a large extent while passing through the pipes as the temperature is lower. The air which is of lower temperature is then pumped back into the greenhouse.

"Air pumped in at a temperature of 41 degrees Celsius in the greenhouse comes out at a temperature of 29 degree Celsius, which is a reduction of 11 degree Celsius. The same method is used to warm the greenhouse which increases from about eight or nine degrees Celsius to 22 degrees in less than half an hour," said Sharan. The major feature is that no water is used in the ETHE process.

Launched in Kothara village in Kutch district as a pilot project, AAG is now spread over 120 square metre area and has so far produced tomato, chilli and capsicum. In fact, capsicum was produced for the first time in Kutch.

"We have begun with vegetables, but aim to grow medicinal plants in the near future and, at a later stage, will also consider growing flowers," Sharan said. Vegetables grown using AAG were supplied to nearby villages and even the Indian Air Force station at Naliya. Medicinal herbs will be grown only after tying up with a purchaser.

Cost per square metre to set up an AAG with ETHE technology works out to about Rs 1,000. "High-value crops would recover crops in about four or five years," he said.

CILET has already set up an AAG for a farmer in Kutch and Sharan said several corporates have been approaching the institute. "We will commercially market this product. Once it is patented, the technology cannot be replicated," he said.

The World Bank's award carries a certificate of recognition, a plaque and $150,000. A total of 2,600 projects from 38 countries competed.

As many as 78 projects were invited to the Bank's headquarters in Washington on May 24 and 25 to make presentations. Of the five categories, Sharan won the award in the Clean and Sustainable Technology category.

"We will use the award sum to further develop the technology and make improvisations," Sharan said.