The Indian ministry of new and renewable energy has been promoting biomass based gasifier and biogas based power systems for providing unmet demand of electricity in villages in association with state governments, NGOs, village level organizations, institutions and private entrepreneurs for their captive use and / or sale of electricity to individual / community etc.
In a written reply to a question, Dr Farooq Abdullah minister of new and renewable energy said that the ministry had incurred an expenditure of INR 2.92 crores under biomass gasifier based power projects and INR 3.215 crores under biogas based power plants during last three years ie 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11.
An allocation of INR 3.00 crores for biomass gasifier and INR 5.00 crores for biogas based power programs have been made for 2011-12.
He said, so far 60 gasifier systems have been set up for electricity generation and 50 such biomass gasifier systems have been sanctioned for installation / commissioning using surplus agricultural residues.
In addition, 351 biogas based power projects with aggregate power generation capacity of 6.96 MW have been sanctioned in 19 states out of which 116 plants with 1.354 MW aggregated power generation capacity have been installed till now.
