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Unit 19: Sectoral Performance II: Role of Infrastructure in Economic Development
To some extent, the Government has appreciated the need to encourage the fuelwood plantation Notes
programme and has promoted farm forestry and social forestry programmes since 1976. But by
subsidising and encouraging richer and more affluent farmers to go for massive tree planting, the
Government has turned wood into a lucrative economic commodity and has condemned the weaker
sections in the rural areas to continue to experience acute fuelwood crunch. The correct alternative
would be to involve the rural poor, especially the rural women, directly in the community forestry
programmes and help them to produce more fuel and fodder and share these resources equally. This
alternative is rather difficult for the bureaucrats to implement but sooner or later, the Government
policy makers will have to try this method.
Biogas : The Planning Commission Working Group on Energy Policy stated enthusiastically, “Biogas
plants constitute the most promising alternative energy technology in the household sector”. The
Government announced a series of subsidies and concessional bank loans for the construction of biogas
plants in rural areas. Under the National Project for Biogas Development nearly 3.2 million biogas
plants have been set up so far in the country; the current annual target is around 2 lakh biogas plants.
The oil-energy crisis was also responsible for an explosion of interest in biogas plants in
India during the 1970’s.
The biogas plant has the double advantage of producing fuel as well as manure. The gas produced
can be used for cooking and lighting and to carry out simple agricultural operations. It is estimated
that there are 15 million households with the requisite number of cattle—4 to 5 heads of cattle are the
minimum needed to feed a family size plant. The scheme has thus a large potential for developing
local sources of energy supply and the Government introduced an ambitious and massive programme
of installation of biogas plants.
The biogas programme did not have the success the Government anticipated. One basic reason for
the poor performance is that no attempt was made to study carefully the cost-benefit of these plants
to the users. More important than this factor, is the growing realisation that the biogas scheme would
further accentuate the inequality between the energy-haves and the energy-havenots in the rural
areas. For instance, it has been estimated that only about 10 per cent of rural households in India
possess 4 to 5 heads of cattle and, therefore, the biogas plants would be useful only for richer farmers.
Again, these richer farmers would use animal dung only for their own personal needs and deprive
the poor of a fuel that does not have any price at present and has been freely available. To overcome
these problems created by family biogas plants, the Government and some voluntary agencies have
started promoting community plants which are relatively economical to set up and to operate. But
there are problems of collection of manure and distribution of gas in fact, the cost of distribution to
individual house-holds is quite high. Considering the caste, religious, and other social factors in our
villages, the community biogas programme does not promise ot have much future.
Agricultural Wastes : With the increase in the production of foodgrains to around 200 to 210 million
tonnes, residue from grain crops alone would come to about 335 million tonnes. With the use of
improved and efficient technologies, it is possible to increase the scope of rice husks, cotton stalks,
etc. as cooking fuels. Dr. Pathak of the Punjab Agricultural University studied the potential of
agricultural wastes in a rich village in Ludhiana District and found that after all the fodder needs of
the village were met, the energy potential of the remaining crop wastes and animal wastes was
enough to meet all the energy requirments of the village and still leave a surplus. In a situation where
supplies of conventional energy, and sources like firewood, are decreasing and since alternatives like
kerosene are not within the reach of the rural poor, this increase in energy supplies in the form of
agricultural wastes will benefit the society in general and the rural poor in particular.
The present national energy policy of the Government has been extremely lopsided, as it seeks to
solve essentially the oil shortage on the one side and coal and power shortage, on the other. The
major consideration has been the energy needs of industry and transport and of the higher income
groups in urban areas. The national energy policy has virtually ignored the cooking energy needs of the
poor people in urban and rural areas. The sporadic and half-hearted measures to promote solar cookers,
biogas plants and recently fuelwood plantations have not solved the cooking energy crunch in any
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