Biogas programme for rural development: some field based reflections

Biogas literature has had vastly differing judgements on the two major biogas programmes in the world, one in India and the second survey of in China. The paper has, on the basis of a 1034 respondents, from several parts of country, come to some pragmatic conclusions and brought out the the extent to which the programme needs to be location and context specific. The authors feel that the obvious limitations of the biogas technology should not blind us to its advantages which have helped in its rapid and successful adoption in several places. The paper maps out creative efforts required, mainly in R&D, to broaden its utility. It suggests several areas where further research and fact finding is necessary. The major, though tentative finding of the paper is that whereas it has, indeed, by-passed the poor, it has not, unlike some social forestry programmes, gone against the poor.

The paper, however, stresses that its focus is not as much in passing a verdict on the programme as it is in developing a framework for understanding, operationalising and evaluating the programme as a special case of certain types of rural development programmes. The paper takes strong exception to the usual thrust in the past literature of biogas to arrive at one stereotype situation which could be considered representative and pass either a positive or negative verdict on the programme. The paper pleads for explicit clarity of objectives, the domain, the context and most of all the critical assumptions. The paper shows how vastly differing judgements arise from differing critical assumptions. Even with such explicit clarity, programmes could have a range of benefit-costs.