<![CDATA[A great waste: Indian minister Nitin Gadkari wants to collect the nation's urine for valuable nutrients]>
If Nitin Gadkari had his way, all the airports in India would have urine-storage facilities that turn the liquid waste into nutrients.
The 61-year-old minister for road transport and highways, known for his outspoken views, says human pee contains valuable chemicals such as urea and phosphorus, which can be extracted to be used as biofuel.
"We import urea, but if we start storing urine of the entire country, we will not need to import urea; so much potential it has. Nothing will be wasted," Gadkari told a group of young innovators in Nagpur, his hometown.
But the idea has not gained traction, he lamented. "Other people do not cooperate with me because all my ideas are fantastic."
India, an agriculture-driven nation and world's second-largest urea consumer, imports six million tonnes of urea annually and the government wants to drastically reduce this. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in 2017 that India should cut its urea consumption to half by 2022 from the existing level of 30 million tonnes every year.
Human urine contains roughly two per cent of urea, meaning Indians need to produce 300 million tonnes of the raw material to compensate for its imports " an amount which would not be a problem given the country's 1.3 billion population.
A toilet in rural India. Photo: EPA
Gadkari, sometimes touted as a challenger to Modi within their party, has long been lobbying to put human urine into good use.
In 2017, he mooted the idea of setting up local urine banks in agricultural districts, allowing farmers to use the bodily liquid as fertiliser. He proposed to pay 1 rupee per litre (US$0.014) to those who deposited their urine in the banks. The proposal has yet to take off.
The politician, who has business interests in the fertiliser-manufacturing industry among others, also revealed he collects urine " including his own " in a 50-litre canister to fertilise his home garden in New Delhi. The plants which received "urine therapy" showed better growth, he claimed.
Bastian Etter, director of Vuna, a company involved in nutrient-recovery projects from urine in Africa and Europe, said some studies appeared to support Gadkari's assertions.
"Field tests have shown that urine fertiliser is more balanced than most of the conventional synthetic fertilisers, thus increasing soil fertility, crop yields and crop quality," said Etter, but he added that the scalability and profitability of such ventures depended on implementation.
"If India starts reusing nutrients from urine, the country will become more independent from imports and foster its own economy," he said.
Researchers in Sweden and Finland have successfully distilled useful nutrients from urine " albeit on a much smaller scale.
Surendra Pradhan, a researcher at Finland's Aalto University and an expert on treating human waste, said the "urea-from-urine" plan was feasible in India if suitable techniques were employed through public-private partnership models.
Still, there would be immense challenges in terms of finding the right methods, social acceptance, transport costs, size of the plants and competition from multinational fertiliser firms, Pradhan said.
Nonetheless, India's top political leadership is no stranger to exploiting the benefits of pee to the fullest as the country once had a prime minister who drank his own urine to cure physical illness. Moraji Desai, who ruled the country between 1977 and 1979, was a strong advocate of "urine therapy" to millions of Indians who could not afford medical treatment.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2019. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
