Asia Times: Biogas machines transform Pakistani villagers' lives


	January 27, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Biogas machines transform Pakistani villagers' lives
By Muddassir Rizvi

MAIRA KHURD, Pakistan - A simple, gas fuel making machine, which uses freely available livestock excreta, has done for poor, unlettered women in this village near the Pakistani capital, what years of official development schemes could not.

The "biogas" plant has dramatically changed the lives of hundreds of families in Maira Khurd and other villages, some 65 kilometers southwest of the capital city Islamabad. Women and young girls in the village, who earlier spent the better part of the day hunting for scarce fuel wood, now have time to go to school or tend newly planted kitchen gardens, which help feed the family.

"That a simple intervention of installing biogas plants in the rural households would make such a tremendous difference in people's life, was something nobody had imagined," says Helga Ahmed of the non-governmental organization, Initiative for Rural and Sustainable Development (IRSD). The project was started seven years ago by IRSD, with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which is run by the UN Development Program and the World Bank.

Ahmed's group became interested in it when they realized that the lack of a cheap and easy supply of fuel was the biggest problem of the locals. Her group had earlier tried to persuade the village women to take up income-generating activities like making vegetable dyes, but the women said they could not find enough spare time for these. The increasing pressure on the forests for fuel wood was also fast depleting the area's already thin green cover.

"After much thought and by consulting people, IRSD decided to help the community install biogas digesters since livestock was one of the major sources of income generation, but buffalo dung was just going to waste," says Ahmed.

The village women say the biogas machines have given them more time to care for their livestock and work on small kitchen gardens. "The hours we spent collecting wood for fuel are now used in cutting fodder for animals and growing small kitchen gardens," says middle-aged Sagheeran Bibi."Not only do our buffaloes give more milk, we also now have our home-grown vegetables, which means we spend less money to buy these," she says.

The IRSD has installed more than 50 biogas machines in Maira Khurd, which are shared by the 400 families in the village. "These biogas plants have helped many women in our village to take up work like embroidery and dyeing, which fetches some hard cash," says Nasreen, another woman in Maira Khurd. "Earlier, it was women's duty to collect fuel wood, which is not easy to find in this area," she says.

"Unless people get fuel to keep their stoves warm, they will continue to depend on natural vegetation," says an official of the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency in Islamabad.

According to GEF figures, a typical rural family of six people uses 40 kilograms of wood per day to meet their fuel needs. ''Since a biogas unit needs only buffalo dung and water as raw materials, one can well imagine how many trees one biogas digester in a household could save,'' said a GEF official in Islamabad.

The biogas plants have also improved the health of women in Maira Khurd, as they no longer have to sit before smoke-belching kitchen stoves.

"Respiratory tract diseases, eyes infections and coughs are on the decline in homes where biogas is in use," says Ahmed. The biogas machines have helped improve environmental sanitation because the livestock excreta is no longer littered on the ground. "The health hazards of animal dung lying in the open have also been minimized as it is immediately fed into the biodigester," she explains.

The fermentation of livestock excreta in the machines also produces slurry, a rich farm nutrient. The IRSD has taught villagers how to use this on their own little kitchen vegetable gardens.

According to Ahmed, who is a German national living in Pakistan for the past 40 years, the project is "about empowering people, giving them control over their lives by educating them on how best to make use of their natural resources". It is the answer to tackling rural poverty in developing nations, he adds.

Like elsewhere in South Asia, the bulk of Pakistan's more than 140 million people live in villages. Nearly a third of the people in this country, live on below US$1 a day, according to UNDP estimates.

(Inter Press Service)