A school dropout from a poor village, Rammar Pillai, was an Indian hero who turned out to be a fraud. Throughout the summer some of India's top scientists and government officials believed that Pillai had made the most revolutionary discovery of the century. Using a few secret plants he could turn water into petrol. It all started on a class picnic back in 1978 in the rain forests. %u201CWhen I lit up a stove, a spark fell on a small plant and the green leaves started to burn,%u201D he told a newspaper. %u201CMy first idea was to put out the fire, but later I realized that I had found something amazing.%u201D Pillai dropped out of school and spent the next ten years searching the forest, setting fire to hundreds of different plants until, at last, he found the one from his class picnic. He set up a simple laboratory in his home and over the following years his plant fuel, which sold for 20 rupees a litre, powered all of the village machinery. Outside of his village, nobody took Pillai seriously. But in July he was given a chance to prove his plant petrol was the real thing at the Department of Science and Technology in New Delhi, India's capital. After seeing Pillai's experiment, the department head said, %u201CIf this is true, we are sitting on a gold mine.%u201D India's fuel expenses add up to 20 percent of its total imports and Pillai's discovery raised hopes that India could free itself from debt to the oil-producing nations of the Gulf. But during a second experimen
