Advances in biogas technology

As a result of population explosion and environmental resource limitations, the world is fast losing its capacity to supply adequate food to more than four billion human beings which is the world population today. Our country's share has reached a staggering figure of about 684 million. Based upon current growth rates and even allowing for reasonable birth rates in several countries in view of their family planning programmes and intelligent population policies, it will touch seven billion mark by the year 2,000 and our country's contribution will, in no way, be less significant. The population growth is not a problem in vacuum, rather it is a problem of numbers of people in relation to the available resources.

Arable crop land is in short supply and as Paddock and Paddock (1964) point

out, "a desert may have fine soil, but it has no rain; the Arctic has moisture, but not the right temperature; mountains are too up and down". Eighty per cent of India's population lives in villages, agriculture provides employment for 69 per cent of the working population of which 43 per cent belongs to

the cultivator category and 26 per cent to agricultural labour. Whatever the shape of solution, the problem of small or uneconomic holdings may take, so long as they remain, they have to be so managed that the farmers can make the best use of them.