Archives of Current Research International

India supports one of the largest livestock populations in the world, and the excreta generated by that population are simultaneously a pollution burden, a household fuel, a soil amendment and a feedstock for renewable gas. Public policy has increasingly framed this material as an underexploited asset, yet the scientific basis for that framing is uneven. This critical narrative review examines the evidence underpinning livestock waste valorisation in India, covering resource assessment, biological and thermochemical conversion routes, environmental and public-health accounting, and the policy and economic architecture that governs deployment. Literature was identified through structured searching of open scholarly indexes and authoritative institutional sources, complemented by backward and forward citation tracking, and appraised for design adequacy, measurement validity, geographical relevance and consistency with independent evidence. Three findings dominate the synthesis. First, national estimates of dung availability and biogas potential differ by more than an order of magnitude because they rest on divergent and rarely validated assumptions about excretion rates, collectability and competing uses; the resource base is therefore far less firmly established than policy documents imply. Second, the technologies that are best evidenced at laboratory or pilot scale are not those that dominate deployment. Anaerobic digestion has the strongest field record, but its climate benefit is conditional on fugitive methane control and on the agronomic fate of digestate, both of which are poorly measured in Indian settings. Insect bioconversion, hydrothermal carbonisation and bioelectrochemical routes remain overwhelmingly laboratory phenomena. Third, valorisation is constrained less by conversion chemistry than by the social organisation of dung collection, the absence of quality standards and price discovery for organic fertiliser, and the opportunity cost of dung as a household fuel. The review identifies priority research needs in measurement-based emission accounting, multi-season agronomic trials with digestate, and longitudinal evaluation of the new national compressed biogas programme. Confidence in current claims about aggregate national benefit remains limited.