Butter of sal seeds earns livelihood to Molandighi’s tribal families
The Statesman | 16 November 2025
Sal seed butter, until now an untapped resource, has begun providing livelihood for marginalised tribal families in several villages within the Junglemahal forests near here. This has been made possible through a project initiated by a central scientific research laboratory based in Durgapur.
Tribal men and women such as Basanti Soren, Budhiram Kisku, Golapi Majhi and Sundari Kisku of Chua and Rakshitpur villages, deep inside the Junglemahal woods of Kanksa, have found a new daily routine that is reshaping their income opportunities. “Now, we have a different kind of morning walk every day,” they said. “We walk, stopping frequently to collect fallen sal seeds from the forest floor.”
This forest floor litter is now earning them both bread for their families and butter for the food, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and bio-industry sectors. How this works was explained by Dr Naresh Chandra Murmu, director of CMERI (Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute).
“An oil expeller extracts butter from the dried, processed seeds after they are steadily fed into a hopper, where the kernel is separated.”
For large-scale extraction, solvents such as n-hexane—a colourless, volatile organic compound belonging to the alkane group are used to derive the remaining fat for maximum efficiency, officials said.
In March 2022, CMERI, operating under the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), launched the sal butter project with a budget of Rs 62.85 lakh. Led by Dr Murmu himself, it focuses on empowering rural communities by establishing a Science and Technology Hub in the Molandighi area of Kanksa, centred around Chua village, once dominated by ultra-left Naxalites in the mid-1960s.
A CMERI division, named Electric Mobility & Tribology Research, comprising scientists Dr Tapas Kuila, Dr Pronab Samanta and Dr Santu Giri, was set up for the purpose. Following a socio-economic survey and technical feasibility study, the team selected the sal butter project as a means to improve the economic conditions of marginalised people in these remote villages.
A seed roller, an oil expeller and filter presses were installed in a far-flung corner of the CMERI office complex. The system became operational in the last week of September. Tribal residents of Molandighi now bring their collected seeds to the plant. “In just a couple of months, this plant has brought a breath of fresh air into our lives,” said Golapi. Budhiram added: “We had no idea that these fallen seeds had such potential to transform our lives.”
Each kilogram of sal seeds yields around 250 grams of oil. About 40 litres of oil can be extracted in an eight-hour shift. Between 15 and 18 per cent of residual butter remains in the press cake, officials said.
The estimated potential availability of sal seeds in India is around 1.5 million tonnes annually, with the potential to produce roughly 0.18 million tonnes of sal fat. However, the country currently produces a maximum of only around 9,000 tonnes a year, owing to stringent state procurement policies and the lack of adequate technical support, according to research by Odisha-based scholars Sanjay Patnaik and Meena Das Mohapatra.