Anju Devi has spent a lifetime cooking her family’s food using firewood and cow dung cakes. Now in her late 40s, the resident of Bataspur village in Gaya district is marvelling at her new cooking stove, which is powered by that very same cow dung, thanks to the Gobar Dhan scheme being jointly implemented by the Union and Bihar governments.
“For the past twenty days, I have been cooking food on gas which is directly coming to my house through a pipeline and I haven’t spent a single paisa on it. Everything is free, from the connection to the meter. I just need to pay the money for the use of the methane gas,” Ms. Devi said, sitting in front of her stove.
Though it was launched at the Central level in 2018, the Gobar Dhan scheme has started to show results in Bihar only over the last month, with local plants piping the methane gas generated from cow dung into homes in three villages so far. Apart from Bataspur, Donha village in Jamui district and Sakri-Wajidpur in Muzaffarpur have been the initial beneficiaries, though there are plans to take the scheme to 11 more districts in the State. The scheme is already being implemented in Haryana, Gujarat, and Maharashtra.
