Thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of a Sikh family, 70 households in Punjab's Bahadurpur village have been getting free cow dung gas for six hours daily for the last three years.
All the villagers had to do was invest a few hundred rupees to buy a gas stove and plastic pipe to get their quota of fuel from the main supply line.
'The idea came when we were laying a sewerage line for which every household had contributed. First, we decided that we will collect cow dung from every household to install a common gas plant but we dropped the idea as it was not feasible. We then decided to rear cows to produce free gas for the village,' 53-year-old Dilbar Singh said.
After returning from Dubai in 2008, Dilbar had helped his fellow villagers to build a community hall for the benefit of the locals.
In 2009, he and some other NRIs and locals laid a 4,000-metre sewerage line in the village.
A joint family comprising of 13 members, Dilbar and his brothers are basically farmers. They also run a dairy farm in the village.
'One of the difficulties we faced was transportation of cow dung. I contacted a German company but the machinery they suggested was costing around Rs 50 lakh. We developed our own by spending a few thousand rupees. I call it jugad,' Dilbar said.
He claims that over three years, the initiative has saved enough gas to fill 2,000 LPG cylinders.
Impressed with Dilbar's work, villagers said the gas plant has also helped optimise the use of cow dung and thereby saved pollution of local water bodies.
