Assessment of Indian bioenergy policy for sustainable environment and its impact for rural India: Strategic implementation and challenges

Abstract

Indian energy scenario has been suffering from persistent problems of reliable supply of energy and environmental deterioration. Among various available renewable energy sources, India has abundance of bioenergy options that used since long time to meet the cooking and heating requirements. Bioenergy economy is totally dependent on market of supply and demands, interdependent to each other. However, traditional bioenergy applications were found as inefficient practice with harmful environment impacts. Modern bioenergy technologies have potential to fulfill the demand and supply gap of the country. Furthermore, they have high energy efficiency with low carbon emissions. Bioenergy technologies such as biogas, biodiesel, bio-ethanol and biomass gasification having potential for cooking, transport and power generation. Various bioenergy policies and programs have been introduced to accelerate the bioenergy in India in past years. However, country is unable to use adequate available potential of bioenergy options due to policy gaps. Implementation of bioenergy policy is allied with various challenges like technical, institutional, financial, environmental and social aspects. Indian government introduces the new bioenergy policy to accelerate the bioenergy based generation in India. Thus, this article attempts to explore and critically analyze the present bioenergy policies and possible options of recent Indian experiences for successful adoption of bioenergy. A survey based findings is also analyzed through logistic regression and linear regression to explain the pattern of awareness and willingness to pay for bioenergy technology with reference to biogas and improved cookstoves. We found that socio-economic variables are important parameters for the success of bioenergy policies in rural India.