Straw can fuel power generation: Firms

Ruchika M Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 13

Even as farm fires rage across the state, posing a major environmental and public health hazard, the state government doesn’t seem inclined to promote industry that can convert stubble into bio fuel.

The state government had initially planned to convert the crop residue into bio-fuels, in a tie up with a Chennai-based firm to take care of bulk of 20 million tonnes of paddy stubble that is generated each year. However this project, which initially proposed to set up 400 processing plants across the state, failed to take off. Had the project (MoU signed two years ago and was to start last year) taken off, the state would not only have controlled farm fires and prevented air pollution, but would have also have been on top of the game for promoting bio-fuel generation.

Some other companies that have started their own captive power generation plants, using paddy stubble as raw material, allege government apathy. The owners of these industrial units say the government is somehow more concerned about promoting machinery for stubble management, which only depletes the state’s already precarious soil health. They rue that the Rs 1,100 crore that Punjab has received for its stubble management programme from the Centre has been used only for promoting sale of machinery.

“The machine has been rejected by farmer unions and small and marginal farmers, as its cost is too high and usage restricted to a few days in a year,” they claim.

Talking to The Tribune, Sanjeev Nagpal of a firm engaged in producing biogas using paddy straw as sole feed, said not only was the industry collecting stubble scientifically, it was also giving farmers up to Rs 2,000 per acre as additional income for selling straw. “The fuel generated also helps save electricity. But for reasons best know to the authorities, they are only interested in managing stubble. This benefits only the machinery manufacturers or the powerful fertiliser lobby. If a farmer goes in for management, he ends up buying and using an additional 50 acres urea per acre of farm. The prices of all these machines too have (artificially) increased substantially as the government gives subsidy on their purchase,” he alleged.

Mahesh Gupta of a Khanna-based firm, which has the capacity to collect and use 2 lakh tonnes of straw to convert it into electricity, says in spite of repeated pleas to the Agriculture Department and the PPCB, their industry was not being incentivised. “The least that the government can do is to incentivise purchase of balers by waiving 9 per cent SGST, which would total to almost Rs 1.50 lakh per baler. Our system is much better than the in situ management, which many scientists claim harms the soil health,” he said.