Research Projects

Stubble burning of crop residue in India remains a matter of grave concern. Punjab, being vastly an agrarian state produces a huge amount of agricultural residue. Punjab has been generating approximately twenty three million tonnes/annum of rice and seventeen million tonnes /annum of wheat straw; out of which three fouth of rice and and half of the wheat straw have traditionally been burnt by the farmers (Devedee and Parihar, 2018). However, agricultural residue can economically be converted into biofuel, an affable alternative can be worked out which can solve the problem of waste management on one hand and energy needs on the other. The production of second generation lignocellulosic biofuels will help to mitigate environmental and nutritional crises. Rural bioenergy set-ups can turn out to be economically beneficial can generate occupations that might provide a means of as income source to local people (Malode et al., 2021). Oleaginous fungal strains for biofuel production: Of late, research has taken a new direction in which fungi strains are being used for production of biofuels. Fungi are natural bioprocessing engineers and they can be used to bioprocess large amount of agricultural residue. Oleaginous microorganisms have emerged as attractive option to produce biofuels (Patel et al., 2020)