“My phone has not stopped ringing since the LPG crisis began,” said Priyadarshan Sahasrabuddhe of Pune, founder of Vaayu Mitra, a decentralised, waste-to-energy biogas model. The set-up promotes the use of home-generated biogas from wet-waste, over the typical LPG supply that homes use for cooking.
The recent West Asia conflict led to an energy crisis in India when the Strait of Hormuz — where most of India’s imported LPG comes through — was closed. Hospitality industry, food processing companies and households in the country rushed to switch to alternatives, many switching back to traditional wood and cow-dung cake-fuelled open stoves, and induction stoves. Soon after, long queues of people waiting in line for an LPG cylinder became a common sight in almost all cities of India with many paying as high as ₹2,500 to ₹5,000 for a ₹950 LPG cylinder, many being sold in the black market.
Sahasrabuddhe has been LPG-free for the past seven years and his company has helped restaurants, cafeterias, canteens and families in Pune and nearby cities reduce their dependence on LPG. He has installed the biogas system for around 440 customers since 2015. The 405 currently active systems of the total installed manage 1,119 tonnes of waste annually, and the biogas produced in the process has saved around 3,000 LPG cylinders of 14 kg, worth ₹2.8 million in a decade. Sahasrabuddhe himself has saved around ₹70,000 in the last seven years doing all his cooking on biogas.
The recent situation has brought in new challenges for him. “Due to the acute shortage of cooking fuel, an ice-cream manufacturer asked me to install Vaayu overnight as his production had come to a halt. Overnight installation is not possible as we do a complete waste-audit to gauge the needs of the clients before installing the set-up. I am trying to meet the growing demand but it is difficult to do it on such short notice,” he said.
India imports 60% of its LPG consumption, most of which, about 90%, comes through the Strait of Hormuz. It relies on the imported LPG gas for industrial use in the hospitality industry as well as for domestic use. In 2025 (April to December) India imported 18,796 thousand metric tonnes of LPG for domestic use. There is a sharp rise in LPG import due to government schemes to promote clean (smokeless) fuel as opposed to traditional wood and charcoal burning stoves, and other factors like growing hospitality industry and a growing population. The imports rose from 18,514 in 2023-24 (April to March) to 20,667 in 2024-25 (April to March), according to the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC), an attached office under India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, established in April 2002.
Read more: LPG supply shock exposes fragility of India’s clean cooking strategy
A residential township in Pune’s Hinjawadi has installed the Vaayu Mitra in 26 buildings across two phases in 2025 and 2024. About 98 flats in this township have taken the biogas connection through a metred pipeline to a dedicated stove in their kitchens.
Suneel Kulkarni, representative of the developer group of the township, Megapolis, said that when the idea was brought to him, he and his partners were a little skeptical about it as they had seen organic waste composters attracting rodents, flies and other insects, emitting foul smell and making the whole ambience unhygienic. Before installing it in the buildings, they had a small trial setup.
“After seeing the results of the trial we realised that it added value for the residents. Many residents opted for the biogas pipeline from the 30 kg digester that is installed on the terrace of every building. Now, they are definitely feeling more secure in this time of crisis,” he said.
Another user, Angad Patwardhan, a Pune-based actor and voice artist who has been using the digester since March 2022 has been LPG-free since the past four years and says his family saved an average of 12 cylinders per year. They just keep a spare for emergencies.
“We are a family of five and our house help staff of two have another independent kitchen. Both the kitchens have been exclusively running on biogas, for the last five years. The 10 kg digester we have, runs on wet-waste that we purchase from our SWaCH (a waste management workers’ cooperative) staff, at ₹300 a month. This way we are able to manage 3.5 tonnes of wet waste per year from a single household, and have managed to reduce our dependence on imported fuel,” he said.
Patwardhan pointed out that while the set-up was practically free of cost and in the long run proved profitable monetarily, the installation cost of ₹100,000 was needed to get things going and they had to ensure proper servicing of the digester twice a year, amounting to a recurring cost of ₹3,000 per year.
“When I thought of installing Vaayu, the idea was to do my bit for the environment and money was not an issue. But for many people it is,” he said.
The upfront cost, Kulkarni also said, was a challenge that prevented real estate developers from installing the Vaayu Mitra.
“Developers need to install wet-waste management systems by law, and in the case of Organic Waste Composters, the hefty electricity bill was something the residents had to collectively bear. But Vaayu’s set up is zero-energy and does not have additional costs, saving almost ₹2,000 per flat every month on electricity bills. Though the system pays for itself in the long-run the installation cost of ₹10,000 per flat is something that builders do not want to pay out of their pockets,” he said.
He told Mongabay-India that the expense for installing Vaayu set up in each phase of the township reached around ₹80-85 lakhs (₹8-8.5 million), something that deters many developers from using this system instead of traditional organic waste composters.
Patwardhan added that like the government pays subsidies for installation of solar panels and the Pune Municipal Corporate provides a 5% rebate on property tax for composting and installing biogas systems, installation of these biogas set ups should be made more lucrative with government subsidies to make them financially viable for large-scale adoption.
Patwardhan also shared the social stigma around waste, saying that some neighbours falsely complained about the smell when he had a waste-digester in his house. “After this I moved it onto the terrace to keep it out of sight. But we need to change our attitude towards waste to adopt these solutions,” he added. He further said that in the initial months there was also some technical issue that led to the digester “vomiting” but the Vaayu team fixed it when he raised the issue.
However, many argue that due to its low calorific value (4,500 to 5,000 kcal/m3), biogas leads to slow cooking and the task of managing the community digesters often deters citizens from switching to biogas.
Vitthal Kauthale, Chief Thematic Programme Executive at Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation (BAIF), Urali Kanchan in Pune told Mongabay-India told that their 300 cubic metre biogas plant supplies gas to around 85 staff households in the campus, and the families save up to four LPG cylinders per year.
But highlighting the challenges of the fuel he said, “While biogas holds promise, factors like proper feeding, temperature, sunlight, distance and moisture content are a few challenges that need to be ironed out before expecting large-scale adoption. In our campus we have kept three storage tanks to ensure that all the homes receive the supply evenly because the plant is more than a kilometre away and a pipeline from there would have reduced the efficiency by large.”
The recent gas crisis has underscored the need for more decentralised, green-energy solutions for cooking like solar cookers and smokeless biopellets.
Vishakha Chandhere, founder of Orjabox, an organisation working to promote solar cookers and other green-energy solutions for cooking, told Mongabay-India that the company has demonstrated renewable energy cooking techniques to over three thousand people in the last five years motivating them to use clean energy in parallel with LPG and cook at least one meal with renewable energy. Organisations like The Gram Gaurav Prathisthan, a charitable trust working with rural communities in Saswad, Pune, are using solar cookers and biochar together to cook food.
She added that the recent LPG shortage has led to an overwhelming demand for solar cookers and training demos in both rural and urban areas from individuals, caterers and community kitchens.
“Unlike two months ago when I would have to convince people to use solar cookers and list out its benefits like it being cost-effective in the long run, health aspects etc, they are now approaching me!” she said. “The argument that I used to get was that LPG is easily accessible and they can control the flame and it cooks the food faster. These are all true but once people start seeing the practicality of the solution — that it saves a recurring expense, no constant monitoring needed, and tastier food, they do not want to go back to LPG.”
Ketaki Kokil, Director, Ecosense Appliances Pvt Ltd, working to promote the use of bio-pellets (made of agricultural waste) for cooking instead of traditional charcoal of fuelwood told Mongabay-India that till February of 2026, they were able to sell around three to five commercial stoves a month but since March 2026, soon after the Strait of Hormuz closed, they have sold over 300 stoves for commercial purposes to various cafes, major hotel chains, caterers and canteens. “We have supplied our commercial stoves in many parts of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Kerala, and cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Coonoor, Kolkata, and Delhi. As these improved cookstoves need pellets to operate, we were able to connect with local pellet manufacturers from these regions to supply to our customer,” she said.
In March itself, the team sold more than 1,000 domestic stoves to individual customers from across India. They are also getting inquiries from small and medium enterprises for domestic stoves for their workforce as a way to continue operations, which are being affected as migrant workers return home from cities due to the gas crisis.
Chandhere added that inventions in the solar cooking models like tube-solar cookers which can cook even when its partially cloudy, parabolic cookers can now cook as fast as LPG are few factors that are lucrative to buyers but lack of government support like subsidies and that of research and innovation has prevented the expansion of solar cookers.
Kauthale of BAIF says green energy setups for cooking, such as solar cookers, biogas or bio-pellets, should be integrated into our lifestyle instead of treating them as back-up solutions to be used in times of crisis.
“We cannot stop using LPG altogether. But we need to create an ecosystem that favours this shift to green cooking solutions through awareness, behavioural change and government support,” he said.
Aditi Tandon Senior Production Editor.
This story was originally published by Mongabay and has been republished with permission.