Nitin Gadkari has an idea to end urea imports — store people’s urine to manufacture urea. Drawing parallels with biofuel extraction from natural waste, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister said that even human urine can be used to make biofuel and produce ammonium sulfate and nitrogen.
Addressing a gathering of young innovators at the Mayor Innovation Awards function of the Nagpur Municipal Corporation on Sunday, the veteran BJP leader was quoted by The Indian Express as saying, “I have asked for storage of urine at airports.”
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“We import urea, but if we start storing urine of the entire country then we will not need to import urea. It has so much potential, and nothing will be wasted,” he also said.
It is, however, not the first time he has voiced such as idea. Back in 2015 as well, he had said that the plants showed better growth with ‘urine therapy’ than with ‘plain water.’ Thereafter in 2017, Gadkari had suggested storing urine in urine banks in every tehsil to produce urea.
In 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his radio show Mann ki Baat, had also talked about reducing urea consumption by half by 2022. Nearly 30 million tonnes of urea is consumed by India each year. Of this 24 million tonnes is domestically produced and 6 million tonnes is imported.
