India will play a significant part in evolving research and development programmes, for which it is the Co-Chair. Stating this, Dr K. Kasturirangan, Director of the Bangalore-based, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), said that while the European Union has committed $2.4 billion recently, Japan, US, UK and Germany are among those countries, which have launched big programmes.

Dr Kasturirangan, a member of recently set up, inter-ministerial National Hydrogen Board (NHB), gave his inaugural address to the international conference on 'Solid State Hydrogen Storage-Material and Applications,' organised by the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials , Hyderabad. Even in India, a national hydrogen energy road map is being finalised with key inputs from NHB, he said.

Though much research effort is centred around the potential use of hydrogen as a transportation fuel, the environmental issues and depleting hydrocarbon reserves are bound to bring more attention to this widely found gas, Dr Kasturirangan, a present MP and former Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said.

The Secretary, Department of Science and Technology , Prof. V.S. Ramamurthy, said, "We have to move away from hydrocarbons and renewables offer the best option, though they have cost disadvantages at present."

However, with technological breakthroughs, it should be possible to tap hydrogen as an alternative fuel to drive the economy in the next few decades. As energy drives households, industry and transport, even hydrogen should be explored to fit into these three major areas before charting out a hydrogen-based road map of energy, he said.

Earlier, Dr R. Sundaresan, one of the convenors of the conference, said in his welcome address that experts from the US, Germany, France, China were taking part in the two-day meet, which was being jointly organised by the Asia Pacific Centre for Energy and Environment, IIT Madras and the Institute for Nuclear Technology and Energy Systems , University of Stuttgart, Germany.