Potential gains

Govt is encouraging use of farm waste

The recent well-judged changes in the policies concerning the management of biomass, including agricultural residues, seem to have the potential to foster its gainful use, rather than letting it go to waste or be disposed of inappropriately to pose environmental hazards. These amendments include fine-tuning the norms for co-firing thermal power plants with pellets made of biomass and a set of new guidelines for disposing of crop leftovers, especially the paddy stubble, which is often torched in-situ in fields. These measures, if implemented meticulously, can help reduce the use of environment-unfriendly fossil fuels, particularly coal, in power plants, strengthen the country’s energy security, and enhance farmers’ income. Besides, these are in tune with the global trend of incentivising the use of biomass as feedstock for energy production as part of the strategies to curtail the carbon footprint of economic development and mitigate climate change.

In India, these can be viewed as steps towards meeting the goal of lessening greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector and tackling the menace of crop residue burning, which causes a spike in air pollution in the National Capital Region (NCR) in October-November every year. Going by official estimates, switching from coal to biomass in thermal power units can slash carbon dioxide emissions by 38 million tonnes. However, the task is not free from formidable challenges, given the paucity, if not total lack, of infrastructure and wherewithal needed for collecting, transporting, and processing biomass and farm waste. Although the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022, mandates all thermal-power units to use renewable fuel as part of their feedstock, compliance with this provision is under par. This is, perhaps, what has prompted the government to revisit the biomass co-firing policy. The amended version of the policy provides for benchmarking the prices of pellets, keeping the interests of all stakeholders in view. Going a step further, it also expects power units to establish sustainable biomass-supply chains. Interestingly, the government has indicated it might consider penalising power producers for defaulting on biomass co-firing targets.

In the case of the agriculture ministry’s fresh guidelines for crop-residue management, the primary aim appears to be to promote economic uses of farm waste to make them a source of income for farmers, rather than useless refuse to get rid of by burning. For this, rural bodies, such as farmers’ producer organisations, cooperative societies, village panchayats, and private entrepreneurs, are proposed to be incentivised to collect the biomass from the fields and supply it to the entrepreneurs engaged in making various kinds of utility items from it. Liberal financial assistance, to the tune of 65 per cent of the project cost, apart from subsidies on the machines and other equipment used for this purpose, is mooted to be provided through financial institutions like the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development and the Agriculture Infrastructure Development Fund. Significantly, a pilot project is scheduled to be launched forthwith to process about 1.5 million tonnes of rice straw in over 300 facilities at select locations in northern states. A noteworthy outcome of this move would be the much-needed mitigation of the NCR’s air pollution emanating from farm fires in its vicinity.