Of waste products and tasty food

habra: eighteen kg of human and animal excreta every day! and it helps cook mouth-watering food. this is exactly what a local hotel and several tea stalls here are doing. do not grimace. it is a serious business. and the people simply love the food. the idea, conceived by the west bengal renewable energy development agency, was first given a serious thought by the ashokenagar-klayangar municipality in habra in february last year.desperate to solve the disgusting problem of disposing of piling up heaps of animal and human excreta every day, the municipality saw the first ray of hope when wbreda advised it to set up a biogas plant that would simultaneously clear up the smelly waste and provide fuel free of cost. so, as people visiting the huge market at kachua more relieve themselves in the nine toilets, the 1000 cubic feet gas chamber turns the waste into an odourless fuel and supplies it through a pipeline to the locally popular bholanath hotel and a number other tea stalls dotting the area. initially we were hesitant to undertake the project, admitted municipality chairman chittaranjan basu. he was not sure whether the people would agree to use fuel prepared from excreta. but the rs 700,000 project has now turned out to be a runaway success, basu says. so much so that as many as 10 similar biogas plants are coming up in the area. ramkrishna paul, officer-in-charge of the plant, explained how the gas plant worked. it is simple indeed. the night soil from the nine toilets in the market are collected in the underground storage tanks. the gas produced is then supplied through the pipeline as ready fuel free of cost. however, the manager of bholanath hotel is not happy. the fuel supplied to his hotel is not sufficient and he needs more. also, the fuel should generate more heat, he feels, to help cooking less time consuming. the project manager, however, explains that water vapour collected in the plant was making the fuel less heat-producing. it is not a serious flaw and can be easily corrected. but even after repeated requests, the wbreda engineers have not attended to the problem so far, he complains. yet the idea of obtaining fuel from excreta, that too free of cost, has caught the fancy of the residents of habra. and they are in the process of setting up 10 such plants.