“One would wonder, how the Chinese were able to install about seven million biogas plants in about four years.“So began Khadi and Village Industries Commission director Jashbhai J Patel 's remarks at the conclusion of a tour of China in 1980. His rueful tone was justified. In that same report, economist TK Moulik explained that India had been among the pioneers in biogas technology but it had taken the Chinese a mere decade to overtake her.More than 30 years of experience in developing and implementing a gobar gas digester programme coupled with favourable climate and the world's largest cattle population (then estimated at 240 million heads; 3.5 times that of China) had produced a mere 70,000 digesters, one in five of which was no longer operational.Patel and Moulik's visit to China was part of a trilateral Germany-ChinaIndia exchange coordinated by the Bremen Overseas Research and Development Association (BORDA).Among BORDA 's missions was to facilitate “technical cooperation among developing countries“ by organising studies of technologies adapted to their needs and potential, and to disseminate the results.Biogas digesters were precisely such a technology . One of us (Wagner) was the sinologist on the project. He prepared the group's visit through an analysis of Chinese biogas handbooks for village technicians, and focussed during the trip on the political and social parameters of biogas use in China.Viewed against the contemporary Hindu right's malicious violence against fellow Indians in the name of `gau raksha', this nearly 40-year-old Sino-Indo-German collaboration is a sobering reminder that we continue to miss our own potential while promoting obscure science through blind and uncritical reverence for an animal. The various institutes and companies set up in recent years to prove and market the health benefits of cow dung and cow urine are but one example.Patel and Moulik's impressions of biogas development work in 1970s China therefore remain just as relevant today , when fanciful justifications continue to trump simple solutions. Unlike in India, where the biogas development programme was elite in both its initiative and composition, the Chinese process was far more adapted to village-level knowhow and resources. So, while Indian scientists strove to build a technologically efficient biogas plant, the Chinese worked with the materials they had, adjusted to the capabilities of their farmers, and built one hundred times the number of biogas digesters.And they gradually improved their technical quality as incomes and technical capabilities rose. The benefits of such an adapted approach were manifold. At the level of the individual household, they provided gas at no cost that could be used for cooking and lighting a lamp. This freed women from other daily chores such as collecting fuel and stoking a fire, while the lamp significantly expanded the work-day and improved educational levels by making it easier for parents to read and children to study after dark.At the same time, biogas use reduced the pressure on local wood resources while the digesters transformed agricultural refuse (stalks, leaves, human and animal excrements) into a bug-free nitrogen-rich manure for use in agriculture. These incentives, in turn, spurred the development of toilets, collection of refuse, and animal husbandry .Moreover, customary handling of human waste and pig dung in China had resulted in widespread incidence of intestinal parasitic diseases such as schistosomiasis (bilharzia), which affec ted both humans and pigs. The spread of biogas digesters ensured a much cleaner and sanitary handling of waste as the process killed more than 90% of the parasite eggs. The result was a substantial improvement in rural health, lower medical expenses and improved productivity .In the wake of Patel and Moulik's trip to China, a biogas promotion programmewas initiated in India in 1981. A 2015 paper by Shiv Kumar Lohan and others offers numbers for the changes since. By 1990 India had 1.23 million biogas plants. This number grew to 4.54 million by 2012. The corresponding Chinese numbers were 27 million biogas plants built.And even though an Indian Biogas Association has been set up in the past few years to further promote the adoption of biogas, recent estimates indicate that such expansion proceeds in slipshod fashion. Last year, The Economic Times reported that of the 1,10,000 biogas plants to be set up in 2015-16, only 47,490 had been installed.Why should any of this matter? It matters because the wide scale promotion of biogas, in which gobar would play a central role, can bring many attendant benefits, not least the safe and productive disposal of human and other agricultural refuse. Incentives to build toilets to collect such manure could by itself improve health in a countryside where gastrointestinal diseases remain a major challenge.It also matters because it might help more of us recognise that in the name of the cow an extremist view is being foisted upon the vast majority of India's Hindus and upon all of India's minorities. This view has little to do with cows and everything to do with singling out `enemies' and making people turn on one another.And so, the goal is to use those things that distinguish us ­ religion, caste, diet, clothing, the list goes on ­ to divide us.The cow is merely a pawn. After all, if the safety of cows and their ability to contribute to human welfare were truly a concern for the gau rakshaks, then should we not have heard more about biogas and other demonstrably viable and beneficial technologies instead?Arunabh Ghosh is Assistant Professor of modern Chinese history at Harvard University .Rudolf Wagner is Professor of Chinese studies at Heidelberg University.