From waste to wealth: Why India must get serious about biogas

India has a habit of discovering useful ideas and then burying them under slogans. Biogas is one such idea. It is routinely described as a clean fuel, a rural livelihood generator, a waste-management solution and a climate instrument. All of that is true. But unless the government builds a sensible policy architecture and a financially viable market structure, biogas will remain a useful concept trapped in pilot projects, small installations and optimistic speeches. That would be a mistake. In a country that produces huge volumes of cattle manure, agricultural residue and municipal organic waste, biogas is one of the few energy options that can simultaneously address emissions, waste disposal and fuel import dependence. It is a rare case where environmental logic and energy security logic point in the same direction. The climate case is straightforward. Organic waste releases methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide over the short term. Capturing that methane reduces the emissions problem at source. In other words, biogas is not merely about producing a green fuel; it is about preventing a worse one from entering the atmosphere in the first place. That distinction matters because India’s biogas debate is often framed too casually. Not all biofuels are equally defensible. Crop-based fuels can raise questions about land use, food security and water stress. Waste-based biogas does not carry the same moral and economic ambiguity.

When the feedstock is cattle dung, municipal organic waste or agricultural residue, the equation is cleaner: the country is turning a liability into an asset. I recently travelled to the Banaskantha district in Gujarat, where I saw first-hand how this can work. A tripartite venture between Banas Dairy, the local district dairy union, the National Dairy Development Board and Suzuki Research and Development India has created facilities where about 100 tonnes of cow dung are converted into biogas every day. The operation is industrial in scale, even if still modest in the larger national context, and the gas is sold directly to local transport users outside the plant.

This example from Gujarat points to the promise of the model, but it also reveals its limits. Such projects are viable only when multiple revenue streams are available. Gas sales alone rarely support the full economics. Plants also depend on slurry sales, fertiliser value, carbon credits and, in some cases, waste-processing fees. That is not a weakness of the model; it is the model. The problem is that policy in India still tends to treat biogas as a single-product energy business rather than a multi-product circular-economy system. That is where the government must become more serious. If it wants biogas to scale, it must stop thinking in terms of announcements and start thinking in terms of market design. A biogas plant needs assured feedstock, predictable offtake, stable regulation and a financing structure that reflects its real cash flows. None of those things happens automatically. At present, the sector suffers from a familiar Indian policy problem: enthusiasm at the top, fragmentation on the ground. Municipal waste systems remain uneven, even though good work on waste-to-gas has been showcased in places like Indore. Agricultural residue collection is inconsistent. The case for biogas becomes even stronger when viewed through energy security. India still relies heavily on imported natural gas, much of it arriving as LNG from external suppliers and exposed to international price volatility. That dependence is not merely an economic issue; it is a strategic vulnerability. Every unit of domestically produced biomethane reduces that exposure, however incrementally. Biogas will not replace LNG imports, but it can narrow the gap and improve resilience.  In fact, when the gas shortage induced by the West Asia crisis occurred, industrial users across India were informed of a cut in supplies. This included the Maruti-Suzuki plant at Hansalpur, Gujarat. Production of gas from the Banaskantha Biogas facilities was diverted to Hansalput and made up over half the shortfall, according to Maruti-Suzuki officials. This is why the biogas conversation should not be reduced to environmental idealism or rural romanticism. It should be treated as industrial policy. A serious biogas ecosystem can create local jobs, improve sanitation, generate organic fertiliser that can help restore soil health, reduce methane emissions and lower foreign exchange outgo on imported gas. Few policy areas offer so many dividends from the same tonne of waste. But these require a sustainable financial model. That means the government must create conditions under which private capital can actually underwrite projects. Feedstock aggregation must be systematised. Municipal bodies, dairies, farmer collectives and cooperatives must be integrated into collection networks. Offtake contracts must be bankable. By-product markets must be formalised. Digestate standards must be clear. And if carbon credits are to be part of the revenue stack, the rules around verification and monetisation must be credible. This is the unglamorous part of clean energy policy. It is much easier to announce a target than to build the supply chain, legal framework and revenue certainty that make the target real. There is also a larger governance lesson here. India’s waste streams are not going away. Its livestock numbers are not going away. Its municipal waste burden is not going away. These will only increase as the country gets richer and more urban. Nor is its appetite for gas likely to disappear soon. A policy that treats these realities separately is less useful than one that connects them. Biogas links agriculture to energy, sanitation to industry and climate policy to import substitution. That is why the government should be more pragmatic. It should encourage decentralised plant construction where feedstock is available, but not imagine that every district will support the same business model. It should recognise that some feedstocks and locations are better than others and that commercial discipline is not a betrayal of public purpose but a precondition for it. The ideal outcome is not a sector dependent on permanent subsidy. It is a sector where the economics make sense because the policy has been designed sensibly. If that happens, biogas can become what it ought to be: not a boutique environmental project, but a mainstream part of India’s energy and waste infrastructure. Biogas is one of the few solutions that can deliver measurable gains on emissions, waste and fuel imports at the same time. But only if the government stops treating it as a niche idea and starts treating it as a national necessity.

The writer is Director and the Printer & Publisher of The Pioneer; Views presented are personal.