Potential gains – Govt is encouraging use of farm waste

Source: The post is based on the article “Potential gains – Govt is encouraging use of farm waste” published in Business Standard on 6^th July 2023.

Syllabus: GS 2 – Government Policies and Interventions for Development in various sectors and Issues arising out of their Design and Implementation.

Relevance: About the policy changes and new guidelines for crop-residue management.

News: Recently, the agriculture ministry has introduced new guidelines for crop-residue management.

About the New Guidelines

The primary aim of the new guidelines is to promote economic uses of farm waste. It makes farm waste a source of income for farmers, rather than burning it as useless refuse.

For this, rural bodies like farmers’ producer organizations, cooperative societies, village panchayats, and private entrepreneurs will be collecting biomass from fields. Then, they will supply it to entrepreneurs engaged in producing various utility items from it.

The government will provide financial assistance in the form of 65% of the project cost, along with subsidies on machinery and equipment.

Assistance will be provided through the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and the Agriculture Infrastructure Development Fund (AIDF).

Moreover, amendments have also been made to the existing biomass co-firing policy.

What amendments have been made in biomass co-firing policy?

Along with a new set of guidelines, policy amendments have been made which include improving the norms for co-firing thermal power plants with pellets made of biomass.

The amended policy provides for benchmarking the prices of pellets, with the expectation that power units will establish sustainable biomass-supply chains.

Implementation of these measures can reduce the reliance on environmentally unfriendly fossil fuels in power generation.

These are consistent with a global trend of incentivizing the use of biomass as a feedstock for energy production and as part of measures to reduce economic development’s carbon footprint and combat climate change.

Why were these amendments and guidelines required?

It will address the issue of crop residue burning, which causes severe air pollution in the National Capital Region (NCR) during October-November every year.

As per official estimates, switching from coal to biomass in thermal power units can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 38 million tones.

However, challenges exist due to the lack of infrastructure and resources for collecting, transporting, and processing biomass and farm waste.

Although the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022 mandates all thermal-power units to use renewable fuel as part of their feedstock, compliance with this provision is inadequate.