Bahraich district magistrate shows how to make money from waste
BAHRAICH : District magistrate Dr Dinesh Chandra has blazed a new trail, demonstrating how to make money from agricultural waste, so that stubble burning and other such harmful practices may be kicked.
Dr Chandra collected and sold dry leaves that fell from trees in his residence and district collectorate. He received a cheque of Rs. 9975 from a famous company which used the dry leaves for making biomass pellets. The DM said this income would be used for plantation and maintenance of trees.
This was the first time when a district magistrate took such an initiative to show farmers can improve their income using farm waste.
To note, earlier Dr Chandra made news after serving sugarcane juice on Holi to promote sugarcane farming in the terai belt along the Indo-Nepal border.
The DM said almost all trees shed dry leaves in summer, but burning such waste was detrimental to the environment. As a positive solution, he collected dry leaves from his residence and office as well as from the residence of Chief Development
Officer (CDO) Kavita Meena and from the campus of deputy director agriculture office . To sell the collected leaves, he contacted Vipul Industries Private Limited which uses dry leaves for making pellets and supplies them to the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC).
It may be noted that as part of the Centre’s plan to check pollution caused by stubble burning, the state-run NTPC Ltd uses biomass pellets as fuel to generate electricity at its projects. These pellets are mixed with coal to generate electricity. To improve air quality, the NTPC ordered 9.3 lakh tonnes of biomass pellets for co-firing in 2021.
Ram Ratan Agarwal, managing director of Vipul Industries, who handed over a cheque of Rs. 9975 to the district magistrate of Bahraich, said the initiative would motivate other farmers of the district to increase their earnings by proper management of their agriculture wastes.
He said his company had paid Rs. 79 lakh for agriculture waste so far.
The DM appealed to all the farmers, gardeners and forest employees to not burn dry leaves/agriculture waste but to collect them and earn by proper waste management.