PATNA, Aug. 15 -- The Bihar government has turned to major oil companies to facilitate large-scale production of compressed biogas (CBG) by offering them free land in four cities after years of modest returns from its village-level community units, officials familiar with the matter said on Saturday. The state cabinet chaired by chief minister Samrat Choudhary at its last meeting, approved the urban development and housing department's (UDHD) proposal to allot 10 acres of land free of cost for 25 years in each of the four municipal corporations-Gayaji, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur and Biharsharif. Officials of UDHD said that Indian Oil will set up the plant in Gaya Ji, GAIL in Muzaffarpur, Hindustan Petroleum in Bhagalpur and Bharat Petroleum in Biharsharif. The companies will process organic and municipal waste into compressed biogas. HPCL's Bhagalpur unit alone is projected to cost about Rs.139 crore and produce roughly 10 tonnes of CBG daily. The decision marks a clear shift towards industrial-scale, company-led projects. It follows the state's earlier experience with community biogas plants rolled out under the Lohia Swachh Bihar Abhiyan of the rural development department, in tandem with the Centre's GOBARdhan scheme. GOBARdhan was launched nationally in 2018 as part of Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen) to convert cattle dung, agricultural residue and other organic waste into biogas and bio-slurry. Bihar began implementing community and district-level plants under Lohia Swachh Mission in the early 2020s, with the first units becoming operational around 2022-23. The stated goal was one functional plant in every district, typically of 60-80 cubic metre or 2-metric-tonne capacity, built at a cost of around Rs.50 lakh each and intended to supply piped cooking gas to 20-30 households while generating organic manure. By mid-2025, officials claimed 36 to 38 GOBARdhan units were established across the state's districts. "However, most of them did not work well for a long time and started to go awry one by one. As per the rural development reports, only 14 plants are somehow managing to be in working status, with many others under construction or facing delays," said a senior officer of the rural development department, adding that community biogas plants at Bataspur in Gaya and a women-managed unit in Begusarai's Teghra block, and early projects in East Champaran are currently in the functional state. These plants delivered smoke-free cooking fuel and modest income from manure sales for participating families. A section of the officials of the rural development department said that the overall programme struggled with consistency. Common problems included irregular supply of cow dung, dissatisfaction over the low procurement rate of 50 paise per kilogram, technical failures such as cracks in digesters that shut plants for months, shortage of operators once initial funding ended, and limited daily supply windows of just a few hours. Some units, including one of the state's earliest in East Champaran, fell into disrepair within a year of inauguration. Coverage remained confined to small clusters of households, often leaving poorer or more distant communities without access....