The Budget announcement of setting up 75 biomethanation plants, which convert wet waste into biogas, in cities has got underway, with the Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry approving plans for 42 such facilities. In her Budget 2023-24 speech on February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the setting up of 500 biogas plants across the country under the Gobardhan scheme. Of these, 75 plants were to be set up in urban areas. According to Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry officials, 42 plants with a total capacity of 6,213 tonnes per day (TPD) at a cost of Rs 1,082 crore had been approved and the remaining proposals would be cleared soon. Most of these plants were in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Punjab, an official said. While waste-to-energy plants, nine of which with capacity of 12,000 TPD are functional currently, use dry waste to produce power, the biomethanation plants use wet waste to produce biogas or bio-CNG, depending on the quality of the waste provided. Though the move has been welcomed, some experts have raised a basic concern. “Any plant will be as successful as the level of segregation of waste,” said Atin Biswas, the programme director for municipal solid waste at the Centre for Science and Environment. For a plant to be successful, it needs uncontaminated wet waste. Biswas said the level of waste segregation still left a lot to be desired. Ministry officials said it was not known what percentage of the daily 1.5 lakh MT waste in the country gets segregated, though 88% of all MC wards practised segregation at some level or the other. In order to give a helping hand to the 59 cities that have a population of 1 million and above, the ministry had signed a MoU with Engineers India Limited (EIL) on February 2. EIL would help the cities in developing both the waste-to-energy and bio-methanation plants.
