The main objective of this study was to compare the cradle to grave life cycle environmental impacts of biodiesel produced from Jatropha and fossil fuel diesel. The secondary aim was to prepare a complete inventory dataset of input materials used in biodiesel production and their emission factors. Earlier studies have considered the functional unit as 1 kg or 1 litre of biodiesel production, and some has taken 1 MJ of energy from biodiesel because the scope of the study was limited from cradle to gate. However, as the scope of this study is cradle to grave system boundary it was important to select the functional unit in such a way that it is not biased towards biodiesel or reference fuel diesel. Taking kg or litre will bias the results towards diesel as it has more energy content comparing to biodiesel, similarly MJ cannot be justified as efficiency of engine for biodiesel is less. As the functional of a fuel is to run the vehicle, we have selected the functional unit to be '1000 km travel distance by a passenger car using biodiesel/diesel' for avoiding the bias. It is assumed that diesel and biodiesel both will be used to run a Bharat Stage IV diesel car which has claimed mileage of 27.62 km/L . Primary data for this study is collected from literature and reports, and the background data is used from the GaBi 6.3 software. In the evaluation, environmental impacts from secondary missions which occurs due to infrastructure development etc. are not accounted. System boundary for biodiesel production include Jatropha cultivation, transport to the oil extraction site, oil extraction, oil processing, transport of biodiesel to the retailer, and combustion in vehicle as shown in Figure . Inventory data for this study is collected from the extensive review of Indian specific literature and reports. Emission factors for the raw material used are where possible taken from the Indian specific literature sources, in case of non-availability of Indian specific data, global emission factor or GaBi database emission factor are considered.