In the wake of interest across the world on the use of hydrogen as an auto fuel, the Government of India decided that the Indian Oil Industry should also work synergistically to make headway in this frontier area.  

    With the above objective in view, a Hydrogen Corpus Fund of Rs.100 crore has been set up with individual shares as under  :

IOC, ONGC, GAIL (Rs.16 crore each)	Rs. 48 crore
BPCL, HPCL         (Rs.6 crore each)	Rs.12 crore
OIDB   (balance of Rs100 crore)	Rs.40 crore

The R&D centre, IOC will act as  nodal agency and coordinate with all other Oil PSUs.  The accounts for the funds are required to be kept separately and handled by OIDB on behalf of Government.  The funds will be released by OIDB after approval by the Steering Committee on Hydrogen as per parameters as may be feasible, depending on nature and complexities of individual sanctioned project(s).

In accordance with the directives of the Ministry, OIDB has contributed Rs.10 crore to the corpus during the year 2004-05.  Further grants will be released on requirement basis.