What if one of India’s biggest climate liabilities has been sitting in plain sight all along, visible from space, yet almost invisible in city budgets? Beneath sites like Ghazipur in Delhi and Deonar near Mumbai’s Thane Creek, decades of buried organic waste are decomposing without oxygen, quietly releasing methane, a greenhouse gas up to 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century. India’s cities have been landfilling mixed waste for decades. The question is why these sites remain some of the country’s largest and least measured sources of climate pollution.
Nearly half of India’s municipal solid waste is biodegradable. Segregated and processed, it becomes compost, biogas, or fertiliser. Left mixed and landfilled, it becomes methane. The technology needed, composting, biomethanation, and landfill gas capture, already exists and works in India. What’s missing is the evidence and the incentives across the waste chain, from household segregation to landfill management, to make a better outcome the default one.
A City’s Bet on Turning Methane Into a Climate Win
At the heart of this is a simple question the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) wants answered: what is the city’s wet waste actually worth? Right now, it’s treated as a disposal problem, not a resource, so its potential as compost, biogas, or fertiliser stays locked up while it decomposes into methane instead. GHMC’s effort to find out is one of the first attempts by an Indian city government to treat waste methane as a distinct, tractable climate challenge – a one-of-its-kind intervention with the potential to turn a municipal liability into a measurable climate win, in step with India’s own Viksit Bharat ambitions. Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, India, an initiative under the Institute of Climate and Sustainable Growth, is helping build that evidence base with the support of Global Methane Hub, TERI, and the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research – the data GHMC needs to act, and that investors need to fund what comes next.
Right now, municipal budgets treat segregation, collection, processing, and disposal as separate line items, while methane, landfill fires, health impacts, and remediation rarely appear anywhere, so landfilling looks cheaper than it is. Closing that blind spot, and putting a real number on wet waste, is one of the key things this work is trying to unravel. On the ground, that means finding out what actually gets households and waste workers to segregate wet waste at the source, using behavioural economics and a randomised controlled trial – the first step toward compost, biogas, and fertiliser instead of landfill methane. It also means building a cost-benefit framework that weighs methane emissions, fire risk, health impacts, and land degradation alongside conventional costs, so the city can see the true price, and value of every disposal choice. And it means using satellite and on-ground monitoring to establish verifiable methane baselines, the kind of measurement that can unlock results-based climate finance and carbon markets.
Where the Money Would Go Furthest
The opportunity extends well beyond Hyderabad. India has more than 2,400 active dumpsites, and only a fraction have any methane capture in place. Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan consistently report the largest number of dumpsites nationally, and large metro sites in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Bengaluru concentrate a disproportionate share of India’s methane potential, making them the highest-return targets for early capital. Once a framework like Hyderabad’s identifies which sites offer the best return on investment, the interventions that follow are already technically proven – PPP and concession models for landfill gas capture or CBG generation, tipping-fee reforms, and blended finance built on schemes like GOBARdhan, SATAT, and the Compressed Biogas Blending Obligation.
Why This Is a High-Leverage Investment
None of these interventions is new. What’s missing is the evidence to tell municipalities, investors, and funders which sites, business models, and policy levers will work, and a credible way to measure the results. That evidence gap is where catalytic capital has the most leverage: get it right in Hyderabad, and the same evidence base can shape national policy and be reused across India’s multiple dumpsites, rather than rebuilt city by city.
Methane also rewards urgency. Its warming potential is roughly 20-30 times that of CO2 over a century, but as a short-lived climate pollutant, its 20-year GWP is closer to 80 times that of CO2, so cuts made now deliver outsized near-term cooling. For philanthropies and catalytic investors, that mix of proven technology, a ready government partner, and a nationally scalable framework is rare. Funding the evidence now decides how fast this scales, and how much of that narrow window India can use.