Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has launched the process to revive Mumbai’s first community-level biogas plant, nearly a year after the waste-to-energy facility at Pali Hill in Bandra ceased operations, with plans to modernise the project and ensure its long-term sustainability.
The civic body has floated an Expression of Interest (EoI) inviting registered companies, institutes, trusts and enterprises to revive, modernise and operate the Pali Hill Decentralised Waste-to-Energy Facility through a special purpose vehicle in the H/West ward. According to the tender notice, applications will be accepted between July 14 and July 27, The Times of India reported.
In May, a team of BMC officials, along with local corporator Swapna Mhatre and Pali Hill Residents Association (PHRA) representative Madhu Poplai, inspected the site to review the condition of the facility before initiating the revival process.
The plant stopped functioning in August 2025, eight years after it began converting wet waste from the neighbourhood into biogas and electricity. Set up by the PHRA with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funding, the facility was regarded as one of Mumbai’s pioneering decentralised waste management projects.
Madhu Poplai said the revived plant should be able to sustain itself by adopting updated technology and a financially viable operating model that does not require long-term external support. She added that the PHRA would fully support the BMC’s efforts to restart the project.
The one-tonne-per-day biogas plant was commissioned in May 2018 when the BMC’s proposed waste-to-energy project at Deonar was yet to become operational. It processed wet waste generated by around 70 residential buildings and 23 bungalows in the Pali Hill neighbourhood.
The electricity generated by the plant powered 69 streetlights across Pali Hill and nine streetlights at the Pali Hill water reservoir, making it one of the city’s earliest examples of converting community-generated waste into clean energy.
The facility was shut down after the agency appointed by the BMC for its operation and maintenance found it financially unviable to continue running the project, leading to its closure in August 2025.
