Nali Ke Gas Se Chai Ban Gayi?
Narendra Modi, Prime Minister · 2018-08-10
Speaking at the inauguration of World Biofuel Day 2018 at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, while unveiling the National Policy on Biofuels.
Exhibit A · The claim
Modi described a small-town tea seller who inverted a utensil, cut a hole in it, fitted a pipe through the hole, and used gas piped directly from a roadside gutter to run his tea stall for months.
Exhibit B · What the record says
Biogas from sewage is real, but only through a sealed anaerobic digester that traps and pressurises the gas. A Delhi University chemistry professor quoted in fact-checks called real sewage-to-cooking-gas conversion a complicated, technical process requiring proper expertise, not an open pipe stuck into a street gutter. Modi's story was traced back to Shyam Rao Shirke, a Chhattisgarh contractor who says he patented a version of this technology, but the actual diagram of Shirke's device bears little resemblance to the simple inverted-utensil-and-pipe mechanism Modi described.
Somewhere in Chhattisgarh there's a patent diagram that would like a word with this description.
The JUMLE