GOBARdhan Can Build India’s CBG Industry – Now It Must Make It Perform
GOBARdhan provides a major boost to India’s ambition to scale Compressed Biogas (CBG) production. The next priority is to ensure that new capacity delivers consistently high performance. World Biogas Association India Office Technical Manager Dr Dilip Kumar Khare examines how the CBG Ecosystem Challenge Fund can help make that happen.
The Government of India’s new GOBARdhan National Circular Bioenergy Scheme, backed by an outlay of ₹23,731 crore (~US$2.5 billion), brings together many of the measures needed to create an investable CBG industry: stronger offtake and price visibility, capital assistance, pipeline connectivity, credit support and measures to strengthen the wider feedstock and organic-fertiliser ecosystem.
The integrated nature of the scheme is particularly welcome. CBG projects do not operate in isolation. Their economics depend on reliable feedstock, efficient collection and logistics, plant performance, gas evacuation, access to finance and the productive use of digestate. Addressing these constraints together gives India a much stronger foundation for the rapid expansion of CBG production.
But the success of the scheme should ultimately be judged by gas produced, not capacity announced or installed.
This makes one element of GOBARdhan particularly important. The ~US$52 million CBG Ecosystem Challenge Fund offers an opportunity to move beyond plant creation towards better-performing plants- through technology adoption, process and yield improvement, stronger feedstock systems and district-level ecosystem development.
Its remit extends well beyond conventional research and development, encompassing feedstock mapping and aggregation, district-level CBG planning, technology adoption, process improvement, manure value addition and capacity building.
This breadth gives the Fund an opportunity to address one of the next major challenges facing India’s CBG industry: improving the performance of the plants that already exist, while ensuring that new plants are designed and operated to higher standards.
Make performance improvement a priority
Technology adoption and process improvement should be explicitly directed towards measurable improvements in operating plants. There is significant scope across the existing fleet to improve feedstock handling, methane yield, plant utilisation, upgrading efficiency, energy consumption and digestate management.
A targeted CBG Performance Improvement and Demonstration Programme under the Challenge Fund could accelerate this process. Selected operating plants could receive technical support to address specific performance constraints, with improvements measured against common indicators such as CBG yield, methane recovery, plant availability, specific energy consumption and digestate value realisation.
The value would extend beyond the participating plants. Demonstration projects could establish Indian performance benchmarks, identify proven interventions and generate practical evidence that can be replicated across the industry.
This would also help shift the role of the Challenge Fund from supporting innovation in principle to validating and scaling technologies that solve real operational problems in the field. India does not need every solution to be developed from scratch. It needs proven solutions adapted to Indian feedstocks, operating conditions and project economics, and then deployed at scale.
Build clusters, not just projects
The emphasis on district-level planning is equally important.
India’s enormous organic-waste resource is dispersed across farms, livestock holdings, food-processing facilities, municipalities and other sources. Mapping this resource should therefore be linked directly to feedstock aggregation, logistics and viable CBG clusters.
A district-level approach can identify where sufficient feedstock exists, how it can be aggregated economically, where plants should be located, how gas can reach the network and how digestate can return nutrients to surrounding agriculture.
This can produce more robust projects than simply identifying individual plants based on theoretical biomass availability.
Create a performance culture
GOBARdhan has the potential to do something larger than accelerate CBG deployment. It can help establish a performance culture for India’s biomethane industry.
Investors will increasingly assess projects on metrics such as feedstock security, plant availability, gas yield, methane recovery, energy efficiency, gas quality and digestate economics. Establishing common definitions, measurement methodologies and benchmarks would make these assessments more transparent and improve confidence among lenders and investors.
It would also allow Government to distinguish between capacity that is merely installed and capacity that is reliably producing gas over the long term.
This is an area where international expertise can complement India’s domestic programme. The World Biogas Association could support the Challenge Fund through international performance standards, independent technical assessment, benchmarking and operator capacity building, drawing on its Global Biogas Regulatory Framework and Anaerobic Digestion Certification Scheme International.
The objective would not be to impose foreign standards on India, but to adapt international experience to Indian conditions and help translate technology adoption and process improvement into sustained plant performance.
From potential to production
India has the feedstock, the gas demand and now a significantly stronger policy framework for CBG.
GOBARdhan can unlock the investment required to build the industry. The next priority is to ensure that those investments deliver their intended output.
The Government therefore has an opportunity to make performance improvement as important as capacity creation: using the Challenge Fund to demonstrate what high-performing Indian CBG plants can achieve, establishing common benchmarks and disseminating proven solutions across the sector.
The ultimate measure of GOBARdhan’s success should not be the number of plants supported or tonnes per day of capacity installed. It should be the volume of reliable, low-carbon CBG delivered into India’s energy system – year after year.
As the industry moves from capacity creation to operational excellence, these themes will also be explored at the World Biogas Association INDIA Congress 2026, providing a platform for stakeholders to share best practice, showcase proven solutions and accelerate the development of a high-performing CBG ecosystem.
