India has spent about seven years and Rs 3,600–3,900 crore on machines to stop farmers in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi burning paddy straw. Almost all of that money bought machines that deal with the straw in the field: super seeders, Happy Seeders, mulchers and zero-till drills. Only about 4,500 of some 3 lakh machines are balers and rakes, the equipment that gathers straw so that someone else can use it. Meanwhile coal plants are under a mandate to burn 5–7% biomass and used only a fraction of that.

The Crop Residue Management guidelines for 2023-24, now hosted on the GOBARdhan portal, were the government’s first attempt to fund that collection chain. This piece sets out what the guidelines do, how they fit with the other biomass schemes, which Indian companies make the machines, and what it would take to extend aggregation machinery to farmers across India.

What the 2023-24 guidelines changed

The guidelines add an “ex-situ” window to the Crop Residue Management scheme. An aggregator, which can be a farmer, a rural entrepreneur, a cooperative, a farmer-producer organisation or a panchayat, signs a contract with an industry that uses paddy straw. The Centre and the state pay 65% of the capital cost of the machinery, the industry pays 25% and the aggregator 10%. Eligible equipment includes higher-HP tractors, cutters, tedders, medium and large balers, rakes, loaders, grabbers and telehandlers. A project sized for 3,000 tonnes a season was costed at about Rs 1 crore and one for 4,500 tonnes at about Rs 1.8 crore, with the subsidy rounded to Rs 1.5 crore. Working capital is left to the industry and aggregator, or to the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund, NABARD and banks.

The target was 1.5 million tonnes of straw through 333 collection centres of 4,500 tonnes each, with Rs 600 crore of assistance: about Rs 4,000 of capital subsidy for each tonne of yearly collection capacity. Reports differ on whether the industry’s 25% is for machinery or for operating costs. No count of projects sanctioned or tonnes collected under the window was found.

The machines bought so far mostly keep straw in the field

Since 2018 the four states have distributed about 3 lakh machines to individual farmers and more than 40,000 custom hiring centres, according to Lok Sabha replies published by PIB. Of these, “more than 4,500” are balers and rakes. In-situ machines have a real case: they avoid moving straw at all. But they do nothing for the industries that need straw, and they leave the straw-using economy with almost no collection fleet. Punjab alone targeted about 6 million tonnes of straw for ex-situ use in 2025, and Haryana produces about 7.3 million tonnes of paddy straw a year.

Demand is far larger than the collection chain

Coal plants co-fired about 1.62 million tonnes of biomass in 2024-25, up from 0.38 million tonnes a year earlier, and about 3.42 million tonnes in January to October 2025, according to the power ministry as reported by Argus. The power sector burnt about 859 million tonnes of coal in 2023-24, so the 2024-25 volume was about 0.2% of that coal. If the 7% mandate were met by weight, it would need about 60 million tonnes of biomass a year, more than twice the rice stubble burnt in north-west India each autumn. Straw for plants near Delhi must be at least half paddy residue from Punjab, Haryana or the NCR under the power ministry’s model contract. Brick kilns outside the NCR in Punjab and Haryana have been told to use paddy-straw pellets or briquettes.

The binding constraint is collection, not demand. A baler and rake combination cost about Rs 15 lakh in 2020, biomass plants in Punjab were reported paying about Rs 169 a quintal (about Rs 1,690 a tonne) for straw, and listing sites put baled straw at Rs 800–1,500 a tonne to paper mills and power plants. At those prices, the margin for an aggregator depends on running the machines for as many tonnes as possible in a short window, which is what the ex-situ design tries to guarantee by tying each project to a buyer.

Where the surplus is: the National Biomass Atlas

SSS-NIBE’s National Biomass Atlas of India, built on a study by the Administrative Staff College of India for the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, puts India’s surplus agricultural residue at about 230 million tonnes a year, enough for about 28 GW of biomass power, on 2015–18 data. “Surplus” is what is left after fodder, fuel and other existing uses. Its state table shows that the residue is not concentrated where the crop-residue scheme spends. Gujarat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh each have a surplus of about 17–22 million tonnes, close to Punjab’s 22 million, and Madhya Pradesh’s residue supports about as much power as theirs. None of them is covered by the crop-residue machinery scheme. Of the seven states in the table, those outside the scheme account for about 9,783 MW of potential against 7,176 MW inside it.

Figures as shown on the atlas page and in the power ministry’s SAMARTH copy of the same table; parts of the published table are garbled, so the Maharashtra total and the missing totals should be checked against the atlas download. Older estimates (for example, 234 million tonnes of surplus in a 2014 study, or 178 million tonnes in a CSE report) differ in years and assumptions.

The atlas also shows that the surplus is not all rice straw. Uttar Pradesh’s and Madhya Pradesh’s largest surplus is wheat straw, Maharashtra’s is sugarcane and wheat residue, and in the cotton belt it is cotton stalk. A national aggregation programme would need different machines for each: balers and rakes for loose straw, shredders and stalk pullers for cotton and pigeon-pea stalks, and trash balers for sugarcane.

What collection actually costs

The Sardar Swaran Singh National Institute of Bio-Energy (SSS-NIBE) in Kapurthala, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s research institute, has been the main official voice on this. Its director general has described the core problem as a feedstock that is seasonal, voluminous and low in energy, and paddy straw as harder than wheat, cotton, mustard or maize residue because of its high ash and low calorific value. A 2025 review by SSS-NIBE researchers with US national-laboratory co-authors notes that the economics of biomass supply chains in India are under-studied. The institute ran a national seminar on biomass supply-chain management in Chandigarh in 2024, where Punjab’s science council set out the state’s paddy-straw problems.

The clearest cost figures come from CEEW’s 2025 work in Punjab. Collecting, baling and hauling straw to a straw bank 15 km away costs about Rs 1,330 a tonne of bales, and cutting and baling make up about half of the procurement cost. Delivered to a buyer 50 km away, bales cost about Rs 2,500–3,000 a tonne, and briquettes or pellets Rs 4,000–5,000. Storage is 20–30% of the delivered cost, and hauling beyond about 50 km is likely to be uneconomic. Against straw prices of roughly Rs 1,700 a tonne at the plant gate, that leaves little margin unless machines run at full use and buyers sit close to the fields. That is why aggregation machinery has to be sited around buyers, not spread evenly across districts.

The schemes that touch biomass aggregation

Rates are as reported in official releases and summaries; the MNRE and CPCB rates differ between sources and should be checked against the current office memoranda.

The pieces exist, but they do not join up. The machinery subsidy that funds collection is confined to four states; the pellet grant is confined to the NCR; the general mechanisation scheme pays only 40–50% and is not tied to a buyer; and the co-firing mandate creates demand everywhere without paying for the machines that would meet it.

Who makes the machines

Prices are indicative figures from Indian tractor-listing sites (2025–26), not dealer quotes; they vary by state, dealer and accessories. Inclusion is not an endorsement.

India already has a domestic industry for these machines. Shaktiman, founded in Rajkot in 1997 as a spare-parts maker and now with dealers in many countries by its own account, lists a range that runs from small round balers producing 15–25 kg bales that a person can lift, through a big round baler, to a square baler and hay rakes, alongside the super seeders that the in-situ scheme has favoured. Punjab makers such as Dasmesh and Swaraj, Haryana’s Fieldking and multinationals assembling in India (New Holland, Claas, John Deere) sell square and round balers. Small square balers need 35–45 HP tractors, which most custom hiring centres already have. Small round balers suit smallholdings and manual handling; square balers suit trucking to plants. A national programme would need both.

How to extend aggregation machinery across India

What would fix this

• The Ministry of Agriculture should publish, for every ex-situ project, the aggregator, the buying industry, the machines funded and the tonnes delivered each season.
• The ex-situ window should be opened to all states, with eligibility tied to a signed offtake contract with a co-firing plant, pellet plant, CBG plant or 2G ethanol plant rather than to geography.
• Part of the subsidy should be paid per tonne delivered, so that public money follows straw collected, not machines bought.
• The Ministry of Power should publish biomass co-fired by plant and by source state each month, so that collection projects can be sited where demand is.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

What this piece could not establish

The 2023-24 guidelines could not be opened from this blog’s research environment; their terms come from the PIB release of July 2023 and consistent secondary summaries. The number of ex-situ projects sanctioned and tonnes collected under them was not found. Machine totals differ between sources (3.0 lakh in a PIB reply, 3.24 lakh in an explainer) and so do fund totals (Rs 3,623 crore and Rs 3,926 crore), probably because of different cut-off years. Straw prices are older reported figures. Machine prices are listing-site figures, and Shaktiman’s product range is from its own site and trade-fair listing. The co-firing requirement in tonnes is an illustration on a weight basis, not an official estimate. The National Biomass Atlas page could not be opened from this blog’s research environment; its state figures were read from the page’s indexed text and the SAMARTH copy, and two state totals could not be read cleanly. No standalone SSS-NIBE report on biomass collection and use was found; this piece draws on the institute’s published review, its director general’s statements and its 2024 seminar, and on CEEW’s cost estimates for Punjab.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.