Well, a Chennai-based group is quietly doing its bit to help this cause. Ram Charan – which hit national headlines in December 2021 when it attracted a $ 4.1 billion investment from the American fund TFCC International – had just run a successful pilot project for municipal waste conversion in Naidu’s constituency Kuppam. The project is now being upgraded. The pilot was done by Entity 1, a licensee of Ram Charan.
According to Kaushik Palicha of Entity 1, unsegregated municipal waste could be converted into power. Not just that. The conversion could result in several value-added products as well. “The process is to take unsegregated waste, use a JCB to dump it into the reactor, take it through a microbial electrical chemical process and then convert it to value-added products,” he said. “Through this process, we can make fuel, carbon-rich fertiliser and low-cost electricity, using our hydrogen-producing fuel cells, which can be plugged back into the grid.
The residue sludge is converted into a syrup which is then used as a fertilizer for agricultural purposes. The carbon-rich syrup is found to aid crop growth,” he added.
The successful pilot at Kuppam, if sources are to go by, has enthused the Naidu government to seek out Entity 1 to put up municipal waste conversion projects in five more constituencies, including lower Tirupati.
In a free-wheeling chat with this correspondent, Mr. Palicha said that the municipal unsegregated waste conversion project could trigger a beneficial fall-out on power users as the cost of electricity could drop drastically. This could be a big boon for the state in managing productively its finite financial resources. Also, it could free up huge space since the entire process eliminated the need for landfills to dump the municipal waste, he added. He reckoned that several acres of land could be reclaimed (which are now being used for dumping municipal waste) and put to productive use once the municipal waste conversion project went on full stream across Andhra Pradesh. Fielding a range of questions, he said that a 200-tonne per day waste conversion project could involve an investment outlay of around Rs. 50 crore and reach break-even level in three years. Lauding the proactive efforts of Mr. Naidu in coordinating and monitoring the outcome of the pilot project at Kuppam, Mr. Palicha said that the Andhra Pradesh CEO was literally on a mission mode to put the state on a higher developmental orbit.
In the wake of urbanisation and population growth, waste management assumes criticality for municipalities especially. Ram Charan is pursuing a blinkered-horse-like approach to sort out this issue. Entity 1 has voluntarily cleared one of the landfills near its office in Chennai. Interestingly enough, it has become a cricket pitch now for kids around the area.
Ram Charan group has been doing quiet work in the field of waste management and had some time ago even inked a pact with Bhilai Steel Plant and others for waste management and converting them into value-added products and fuel.
Since it started in 1965 as a single-product and single-location organisation, Ram Charan has grown to become an organised multi-product industrial distributor. It has undergone a major metamorphosis in the meanwhile to become an organisation pursuing deep research and development in the field of waste treatment.
Today, it is run by Kaushik Palicha and his brother, who are fourth-generation entrepreneurs. Being the second largest country in terms of population, India, according to Kaushik Palicha, posed quite a challenge in managing waste. Ram Charan, if one were to go by Palicha, had carried out research on converting waste into energy. The company’s technology, it is claimed, is environment-friendly, as it can be used to convert all types of unsegregated waste into energy, with zero toxic residues.