New Delhi: As part of furthering the ‘Green Growth’ agenda, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Engineers India Limited to develop Waste to Energy and bio-methanation projects in cities with a population of million plus.
The MoU was Signed in the presence of Manoj Joshi, Secretary, MoHUA and Ms. Vartika Shukla, C&MD, EIL and other officials on Thursday.
The Government in the Budget 2023-2024 under the ‘Green Growth’ segment, announded 500 new Waste to Wealth plants will be established under the “GOBARdhan scheme” for promoting circular economy.
These will include 200 compressed biogas plants, 75 in urban areas, 300 community or cluster-based plants, at a total investment of Rs 10,000 Cr.
In February 2022, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, inaugurated Asia’s biggest municipal solid waste based GOBARdhan plant in Indore aiming to generate 19,000 kg bio-CNG gas.
Under Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0, the bio-methanation plants linked to the GOBARdhan and SATAT schemes will produce Bio-CNG as a renewable energy.
“The thrust on sustainable solid waste management has been strengthened under the ambit of Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0, with the overall vision of creating garbage-free cities” said the Ministry in a statament.
Focusing on this objective, MoHUA has decided to set up large-scale solid waste processing facilities in million plus cities. There are 59 million plus cities in India like, Lucknow, Kanpur, Bareilly, Nasik, Thane, Nagpur, Gwalior, Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore to name a few.
According to the Ministry, EIL will assist and handhold the million plus cities in developing such projects for larger quantum of waste integrating circularity in waste management.
“In the first phase, 25 million plus cities will be selected for developing large-scale process plants” it said.
Waste to Energy and bio-methanation projects will integrate the concept of circularity in waste management by producing green energy from dry and wet waste component of municipal solid waste. The by-product such as electricity and Bio-CNG will also help in achieving sustainability of waste management operations.
