The growing environmental concerns have led to the formulation of new coating strategies by employing inherently conductive polymers (ICPs) as a key component in order to eliminate the toxic heavy metals from protective coatings. Also, the renewable resources are given increasing priority within chemical industry and the energy community. Emphasis is therefore, being laid on the production and processing of polymers from renewable resources which show advantages when compared with petrochemical raw materials and are regarded as an ideal raw material. The present work reports the investigations on the corrosion-rest stance performance of soya oil alkyd, containing nano polyaniline (PANI) against mild steel (MS). The corrosion-protective performance was evaluated in terms of physico-mechanical properties, corrosion rate, open circuit potential measurements (OCP) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) studies. The performance was compared to the reported PANI coatings. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.