In the rural households of hot and sultry Haryana, Piyush Sohani and Koushik Yanamandram found a novel way of milking the ‘holy cow’ of renewable energy in India—biogas.

“During the coursework of our Master’s programme in renewable energy engineering and management at TERI University, we got the opportunity to do an energy needs assessment survey around villages in Haryana. We found that most of the households were using dung cakes and firewood to cook their meals. Although they owned cattle, they weren’t using biogas. They complained that the technology being promoted didn’t produce sufficient gas and failed after a short period of time.”

With census data revealing that 64 per cent of India’s population relies on solid biomass for cooking when they have the organic resources to produce their own cooking gas, the youngsters knew that it was only a matter of reliable and affordable technology to get rural India to change its cooking habit. Armed with this insight, they set up SustainEarth Energy in 2013, a social enterprise working to enhance energy access in rural areas.

‘Gau Gas’ is their low cost biogas innovation for rural households. Under this initiative, they have developed a biomass digester that typically uses a 50 kg mixture of dung and water to generate biogas for 4–5 hours of cooking. The unit includes a stove and regulator, installed in households, to provide a good quality flame and costs Rs.25,000. Apart from this, the digester’s discharge can also be converted to bio-fertilizer, both liquid and solid, that can be sold to generate income for farmers.

With funding from Villgro Innovations Foundation, Mahindra Finance CSR, and Unlimited Hyderabad, this start-up has currently started commercial testing with 100 units across Andhra Pradesh and plans to expand to other southern states in the coming year.