Surjeet Kaur is a 38-year-old farmer whose household has tilled land for generations in Patiala district within the Indian state of Punjab. Annually, Kaur and her household collectively harvest about 90 quintals (9 tonnes) of paddy from their 3 acres of land.
The regular incomes from the paddy harvest is, nevertheless, accompanied by the necessity to rapidly get rid of straw and agricultural waste with a purpose to plant wheat. The dominant kinds of paddy and wheat planted in north India leaves a brief 10-15 day hole between harvesting paddy and planting wheat; any delay would decrease the wheat harvest.
With few options, and with every tonne of paddy producing 1.35 – 1.50 tonnes of rice straw, tens of hundreds of farmers burn the stubble yearly, regardless of the environmental prices, harm to biodiversity and detrimental influence on soil well being.
“[In the past] we’d harvest our crop and set hearth to the straw and stubble. There was no different possibility for us,” Surjeet tells The Third Pole. “Gray curtains of smoke would hold within the [air]… We had respiratory issues and generally itchy pores and skin,” she provides.
Burning stubble is a crime in India. The Nationwide Inexperienced Tribunal (NGT) additionally particularly banned stubble burning within the states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan in 2015. In late 2023, the Supreme Court docket, too, directed these state governments to right away cease stubble burning.
However regardless of these interventions, which embrace fines and even arrests, authorities wrestle to restrict stubble burning.
Incentives to curb burning
Since 2018, nevertheless, one other answer emerged for farmers within the form of presidency subsidies to purchase crop residue to be used in power vegetation. In 2021, the Ministry of Energy additionally mandated utilizing a 5-7 per cent mix of biomass within the current coal-fired energy vegetation.
In line with Satish Upadhyay, mission director of the Nationwide Mission on the Use of Biomass in Thermal Energy Crops (SAMARTH), changing 5 per cent coal with biomass pellets saves greater than 35 million metric tonnes of coal yearly. Thus far, 50 thermal energy vegetation, together with 15 within the state-owned electrical energy supplier, NTPC, have co-fired 391,000 metric tonnes of biomass.
A 2022 analysis paper estimated that India produces a billion tonnes of crop residue per yr. Most is used for functions like cattle fodder, natural fertilisers, family gasoline and roof thatching, however practically 356.7 MT is left over. This quantity of biomass, the paper urged, might generate 53,767 megawatts of electrical capability (MWe).
Whereas few impartial audits exist of the size of the uptake, a January 2023 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, citing information from the Ministry of Renewable Vitality, states that, “There are 1711364856 near 230 biomass pellet producers and near 1,030 briquette [coal dust or peat used as fuel] producers unfold throughout completely different states”.
Monish Ahuja, chair of the Confederation of Biomass Vitality Trade of India, tells The Third Pole that greater than 40 corporations have come up prior to now two or three years to fabricate biomass pellets and briquettes, every of which has a median manufacturing capability of 200 metric tonnes (MT) per day.
The biggest of them, Punjab Renewable Vitality Methods Non-public Restricted (PRESPL), with an put in capability of 800 MT per day, has a median each day manufacturing of 500 – 700 MT and works throughout 18 states in India. It makes use of agricultural waste resembling rice straw, cane thrash, maize cobs, cotton stalk, groundnut shells and soya husk.
The highway for PRESPL has been an extended one. In line with Pronob Roy, senior vp (east zone), PRESPL began working with biomass assortment from farmers in 2011.
The sector was small, and it was exhausting to draw curiosity or funding, so PRESPL’s first main investor got here from Zurich in 2013. The Nationwide Biofuel coverage, launched in 2018, gave a lift to the sector, and subsequent insurance policies tapping into biomass potential have led to a speedy growth of the sector, Roy stated.
The corporate now engages with about 200,000 farmers and 100,000 farm employees who collect the crop residue throughout India. Nonetheless, the corporate continues to be largely reliant on exterior funding from traders resembling Mitsui (Japan), NEEV fund State Financial institution of India (joint funding Indo–UK platform), and SHELL (Netherlands).
For farmers, resembling Surjeet in Punjab, promoting crop residue to PRESPL helps take care of the waste simply, and likewise generates further income. “Bulletins are made at our Gurudwara, asking us to contact the VLEs [village level entrepreneurs].” The VLEs then take away the crop residue from “our farmland inside 8-10 days,” she tells The Third Pole, to a particular aggregation level in every village.
The federal government has been completely satisfied to assert this as successful. Ashwini Kumar Choubey, the Minister of State for Atmosphere, Forest and Local weather Change, advised the Indian parliament in December 2023 that there had been a 27 per cent lower in farm fires within the states of Punjab and Haryana due to these insurance policies.
An earlier reply of his, in February 2023, in response to considerations that farmers weren’t getting sufficient renumeration for crop residue, confirmed a extra sophisticated image.
There was a basic decline of farm fires within the states of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan (and a minor uptick in Delhi), however there have been extra crop fires in 2021 in Haryana than within the yr earlier than it, or after it. If the one necessary consider farm fires was the federal government subsidies, the decline would have been regular – which it isn’t.
Nonetheless, any renumeration was a constructive for Jaideep Singh, a farmer from Rampur district in Uttar Pradesh, who has been promoting paddy straw and cane crush for the previous two years.
He tells The Third Pole that the residue, “fetches us round INR 20,000 [USD 241] every year or perhaps extra.” For him, it was exhausting to consider that such ‘waste’ “can have worth too”. His spouse, Saroj, says that the additional cash is used to cowl healthcare bills for aged dad and mom, hiring a tutor for his or her youngsters, and buying seeds and fertiliser.
Challenges persist
Regardless of the uptick, Ahuja says they face important challenges. “We’re nonetheless battling towards the excessive value of biomass power manufacturing vis-a-vis decrease value of energy produced from coal-fired energy vegetation and different renewable power sources,” he says.
Santi Pada Gon Chaudhuri, one in every of India’s pioneers in renewable power, says, “Because the uncooked inputs of biomass come from unorganised sector, its value can’t be regulated by the federal government; this enhances the price of technology per unit.”
He tells The Third Pole, that at INR 6 (USD 0.073) per unit, power from biomass may be very costly, in comparison with INR 2.20-2.30 for photo voltaic, and INR 3-5 from most coal vegetation. Nevertheless, electrical energy prices from trendy supercritical coal energy vegetation are just like the associated fee from biomass-based electrical energy, at INR 6–6.50 per unit. However, because the biomass sector grows, economies of scale are more likely to decrease the prices for thhe technology of electrical energy, Chadhari provides.
Ahuja tells The Third Pole that some prices will be lowered if the federal government gives incentives and subsidies for the capital value of the vegetation. Moreover, tax reduction to compress the crop residue, higher village roads for simple transportation, in addition to the provision of low-cost, nonarable land for aggregation, would make the make the sector engaging for funding.
“There may be additionally an absence of coordination among the many stakeholders,” provides Sekhon of PRESPL. There are a number of ministries concerned, together with these of Agriculture, Atmosphere, Renewable power, and Energy. “The necessity of the hour is to have a centralised company with a single-window time-bound mechanism of clearances for sooner communication and efficient implementation,” he says.
In the meantime, regardless of the preliminary bottlenecks, Harjeet Singh, World Engagement Director for the Fossil Gas Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative – a community of civil society actors pushing to finish using fossil fuels – says, “This transformation in direction of utilizing agri-waste as a bio-energy useful resource is actually a strong triple win.”
After years of burning stubble, he says, this initiative gives local weather mitigation and addresses air air pollution points, whereas addressing India’s power deficit and rural poverty.
This story was revealed with permission from The Third Pole.
