BULANDSHAHR, India – Across much of India, an energy crunch caused by the Iran war has prompted long queues for cooking gas cyclinders.
That is not a problem for Ms Gauri Devi.
On a stove with blue flames, she flips a chapati flatbread, burning biogas produced from cow dung – an alternative fuel helping ease pressure on supplies.
“It cooks everything,” the 25-year-old said in her courtyard kitchen in Nekpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh, about 90km from New Delhi.
“If the pressure goes down, we let it rest for half an hour and it works again.” India consumes more than 30 million tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) annually, importing over half its needs.
The government insists there is no shortage of cooking gas, but supply delays, panic buying and black marketeers have created long queues for cylinders.
However, since the 1980s India has also promoted biogas as a low-cost rural energy source, subsidising more than five million “digester” units that convert farm waste into methane for cooking, and nitrogen-rich slurry for fertiliser.
For Ms Gauri, it requires mixing a couple of buckets of dung with water, then pouring the mixture into a car-sized underground tank topped with a storage balloon.
It provides a piped methane supply so regular that she only uses an LPG cylinder for emergencies or large gatherings.
The biogas works for everything – “vegetables, tea, lentils”, she said.
‘Black gold’ The residual slurry is later spread on fields as fertiliser.
It has better nitrogen availability for plants compared with raw dung, farmers say.
“The manure is so good,” said farmer Pramod Singh, who installed a larger unit in 2025, enough for six people, fuelled by 30-45kg of dung daily from four cows.
And he said the slurry fertiliser is particularly valuable at a time when global supplies of artificial fertilisers have been hit by trade disruptions due to the war.....
