To coincide with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's visit to India on July 1–3, the Japanese and Indian governments will exchange a framework (MoU) for promoting biogas-fueled CNG vehicles. The lead player is Suzuki, which holds the largest share of India's passenger car market and already operates cow-dung-based biogas production in Gujarat state. Breaking from the world's EV-centric automotive strategy, this is a national-scale plan to spread a fuel matched to India's realities. For Japanese companies considering entering India, this move raises the question of "how to make local, native resources the core of a business."
According to reports, the two governments will exchange an MoU on a framework for promoting biogas vehicles during Prime Minister Takaichi's visit to India. The aim is to strengthen both clean mobility and energy security. Specifically, they have set a target of increasing to about 1,000 production plants across India that ferment cow dung to extract methane for use as fuel in CNG vehicles.
Underpinning this plan on the industry side is Suzuki. The company has already begun biogas production in India using support from the Japanese government's "Global South" assistance program, so the intergovernmental framework and private-sector implementation mesh together. This marks Prime Minister Takaichi's first visit to India since taking office in October 2025, and her summit meeting with Prime Minister Modi is expected to cover economic security, clean energy, and economic growth as main topics.
Behind this lies a structure unique to India's auto market. CNG vehicles account for more than 20% of new passenger car sales in India, a premise completely different from EV-centric developed markets. For India, which is heavily dependent on crude oil imports and for which energy security is a national challenge, increasing domestically procurable fuel sources carries meaning on both economic-rationality and political-necessity grounds.
That's where cow dung comes in. India is one of the world's leading livestock-producing nations, and enormous volumes of animal waste sit in rural areas. Ferment it and you get methane; compress that and it becomes fuel for CNG vehicles. It converts waste that is scattered across rural areas, without relying on imports, into energy. And unlike EVs, which presume expensive vehicles and charging infrastructure, it can run as an extension of existing CNG infrastructure — a good fit for a price-sensitive Indian market.
In gauging how effective this framework will be, the numbers from Suzuki's actual plant are instructive. The company's second plant, opened in Bhukhala, Banaskantha district, Gujarat, began operating in January 2026 and was shown to media in March. Its processing capacity is up to 100 tons of cow dung a day, extracting about 1.5 tons of biogas a day from that — enough to run roughly 850 CNG vehicles.
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Location | Bhukhala, Banaskantha district, Gujarat |
| Start of operations | January 2026 |
| Processing capacity | Up to 100 tons of cow dung a day |
| Biogas output | About 1.5 tons a day (equivalent to about 850 CNG vehicles) |
| Raw material sourcing | Cow dung collected from local farmers |
| Positioning | Part of a five-plant plan agreed in September 2023 |
What stands out is that Suzuki is not trying to make the business work on gas sales alone. It plans to sell the cow dung left over after extracting methane as organic fertilizer, which is also a way of dealing with the reality that gas revenue alone makes profitability tough. The idea of creating two outlets — fuel and fertilizer — from a single native resource is, as discussed below, instructive for companies entering the market.
On the rural side, there is talk of expectations around a mechanism in which the local plant buys up animal waste that had previously been a disposal headache. The point made is that if collection turns into cash income, it becomes a secondary income source for farmers and a stable raw-material supply network for the plant.
Among people in the auto industry, there is a view that, given CNG infrastructure already supports more than 20% of the market, a "soft transition" that swaps the content of the fuel for biogas is realistic. It is valued for being able to draw existing users straight into decarbonization, rather than requiring them to buy a new EV.
On the other hand, against the target scale of about 1,000 plants, there is also cautious commentary that the key question is how far the collection network for cow dung as raw material, and its profitability, can be reproduced across a wide area. Since a single plant is supported by its relationship with local farmers, there is a field-level sense that scaling out will require adjustment specific to each locale.
What Japanese companies should take from this move comes down to one point: "the key to capturing India lies in making use of native resources." Rather than bringing in, unchanged, products and business models refined in developed countries, the approach is to make the core of the business a resource that is abundant in India yet not yet turned into value by others. Suzuki's cow-dung biogas is a textbook example of this.
Turned into a concrete action, it starts with identifying, within your own business domain, one "resource that is unevenly distributed and underused in India, and that your company's technology can turn into value." The target varies by industry — agricultural residue, food-processing byproducts, urban organic waste, and so on. What matters is that it is sourced domestically without relying on imports, and that it overlaps with government policy priorities (energy security, decarbonization, raising rural incomes). Suzuki's case was elevated all the way to an intergovernmental framework precisely because it satisfied all three at once.
Another implication is designing multiple revenue outlets. Just as Suzuki structured its economics around a two-pronged setup of fuel and organic fertilizer, a native-resource business often cannot stand on a single sales channel alone. Attaching a price tag to both the primary and byproduct outputs at the market-entry planning stage is what determines local sustainability.
Once the intergovernmental framework is in place, opportunities will open up in surrounding areas such as biogas-related equipment, measurement, and maintenance. The target of about 1,000 plants generates demand for parts and technology at every stage — fermentation tanks, gas refining, compression and filling, and fertilizer processing. For Japanese materials, machinery, and instrumentation makers, there is room to get in not through the finished vehicle but through one stage of the value chain.
Also not to be overlooked is that this links a flow of Global South support funding with private-sector business. Going forward, when structuring a decarbonization or rural-development business in India, whether you can connect your own business to a government support scheme will greatly change the weight of your initial investment. Suzuki's case has high reference value as a precedent where that connection was made to work.
The movement around clean mobility in India is characterized by multiple tracks running in parallel between EVs and internal combustion. Keeping an eye on the latest developments in EV-side supply chains and regulation as well makes it easier to judge which layer your own company should target.
On the certification trends behind India's push to localize EV battery production, see the article on Ola Electric's BIS-certified cells; on the business opportunity around circulating used batteries, see the article on EV battery recycling in India; and on the broader spread of the Japan-India cooperation framework itself, please also see the article on Japan-India Assam cooperation.
The Japan-India biogas CNG vehicle framework distilled, into a single policy, the principle for winning in the Indian market. Rather than bringing in EVs as the developed world's correct answer, it turns cow dung, a resource abundant locally, into fuel and fertilizer, and connects it to the national challenges of energy security and rural income. The first move Japanese companies considering entry should make is to identify, within their own domain, one "resource unevenly distributed and underused in India," design outlets for both the primary product and its byproduct, and then check the possibility of connecting to a government support scheme. What Suzuki demonstrated is the fact that local optimization is not mere cost adjustment but a strategy that restructures the very foundation of the business.
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