We have seen both the tremendous potential of biogas and our underwhelming performance in exploiting it. This opportunity now requires a National Biogas Mission that aligns policy and implementation in a systematically coordinated and integrated manner.
Since the principal off taker and demand creator for biogas and the largest beneficiary in terms of import and subsidy savings — will be the petroleum sector, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas should lead. MNRE should anchor technology standards, capital support and carbon accounting, and lead the decentralised household biogas programme.
MoHUA must enable municipal contracts for source segregation with escrowed tipping-fees and ensure land is made available for processing plants.
The Ministry of Agriculture must drive standards and pricing for digestate so fermented organic manure (FOM) has a reliable market and farmer”s benefit. The Ministry of Power can facilitate the sale and use of pellets or torrefied fractions derived from residues and support evening-peak biogas power where appropriate. A new bio-energy authority may be premature; instead, a high-level Mission Steering Committee at Secretary level, supported by a compact mission secretariat, should be constituted, with industry and technical experts co-opted for continuous feedback and course correction.
The Committee should meet monthly for the first three years, with quarterly reviews by a ministerial panel chaired by the Prime Minister; once policies and execution pipelines stabilise, this cadence can be relaxed. The mission document itself should be prepared within six months by an expert group and financed initially from the petroleum regulator”s budget. The document must set ambitious but arithmetic-sound goals that the system can deliver: by 2030, India will produce 5 million tonnes per annum (MMTPA) of CBG through 500–1,000 operating plants integrated with city gas and residue clusters; by 2035, production will rise to 10 MMTPA of CBG, driven by wider urban MSW and STP retrofits and scaled agricultural residue clusters.
These totals reflect realistic per-plant outputs and commissioning realities and will translate into substantial direct and indirect employment across collection, O and M, slurry processing, logistics and grid services. Project readiness should proceed in parallel, so execution begins the day the mission is notified.
Location-specific detailed project reports should be commissioned immediately — covering 200 agri residues potential hot spots, 100 cities for MSW-to-CBG, 100 sewage treatment plants for anaerobic digestion and gas-use (including retrofits), 100 rural residue clusters, and 200 slurry hubs for household-biogas catchments — using a panel of 10–15 qualified consultants working to standardised briefs and SOPs. These briefs must specify land identification and transfer modalities, interconnection to city-gas injection nodes, feedstock aggregation mechanics, operations and maintenance regimes and measurement, reporting and verification for both gas injection and methane-abatement benefits.
A best-practice manual should be issued and mandatory training and certification required for key plant roles, so capacity keeps pace with investment. Funding must be catalytic and performance linked.
Beyond initial support for the expert group and secretariat, a ring-fenced National Biogas Acceleration Fund should be established to crowd-in private capital using targeted instruments — capital financial assistance against verified commissioning, market development assistance for certified FOM, partial- risk guarantees for municipal
PPPs backed by escrowed tipping-fees, viability-gap support for cluster spur pipelines and injection nodes and pass-through of eligible carbon revenues for verified methane abatement. Disbursements should be tied strictly to outcomes — gas injected into the grid, certified FOM sold to approved buyers and documented methane reductions — so public money pays only for real delivery.
With Governance, finance and execution thus aligned, the biogas mission can move from aspiration to scale: 5 MMTPA by 2030, 10 MMTPA by 2035, cleaner cities and fields, healthier soils, reduced import dependence and a robust domestic industry built on waste-to-wealth.
Mr Deepak Gupta, IAS (Retd), Ex-Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and Ex-Chairman, UPSC; views are personal
