After visiting the K. K. Nag industries and seeing their application in using the DRDO technology the team was curious to discuss with an expert in the field. The discussion was to be focussed on how sound the technology really is and how substantiated the claims of the technology providers are.
We talked to Dr. Dilip Ranade, an ex-director and scientist at Agharkar Research Institute, Pune and now an independent consultant. His expertise and research areas are in the areas such as anaerobic bacteria and methanogenic archaea, Petroleum biotechnology, Bioenergy and Anaerobic treatment of industrial waste-water. With more than 30 years of research and application level work in the field his inputs were very analytical and valuable.
Following are the highlights of the meeting with Dr. Ranade and SIIP team.
– There are no technologies in India at present which are studied and vetted end to end. The focus of all the technologies is on breaking of the solid or faecal waste into liquid (effluents) and gaseous (Methane) components.
However, a detailed analysis of these components is missing and needs to be conducted and documented.
– A lot more research needs to be done to analyse the ability of the bacterial inoculum on various types of faecal waste and how the inoculum deal with the pathogens (if any) present in the waste.
– A detailed comparative study of all the technologies present in the market need to be carried out scientifically and the reported to the public for a better clarity and understanding of the pros and cons of the respective technologies.
– The lack of study stops the treatment units from putting in a secondary treatment system to deal with the effluent discharge making sure it is harmless to be released in the environment without harm.
– A overall standardisation of the inoculum concentration to be used for the bio-digester is not ideal and an optimal concentration can be used provided enough work has been done.
– A bio-gas digester should have a digestion cycle of at least 60 days, the digesters implemented by municipal corporations have a very small digestion cycle of 20 or so days will not get any desired output and volume of gas generated will be very low.