How good assets survive bad owners in a market like India

Oh, this is such an amazing story about municipal waste, natural gas and private equity!

You see, there is a clean bio-CNG plant in Prayagraj.

The operator is EverEnviro. The gas, the manure, the 25-year contract, all theirs.

Plus, it shares the income with the city’s municipal authority. So the people also win.

But trace the ownership up the chain, and it gets interesting.

EverEnviro is owned by the Green Growth Equity Fund, managed by Eversource Capital. Eversource is a joint venture between the Everstone Group and Lightsource bp, the solar arm of oil major BP.

And sitting behind that fund, as anchor backers, are the governments of India and the United Kingdom.

Now the twist. Where did the actual business come from?

In 2021, this fund bought the entire environmental arm of IL&FS.

- Yes, that IL&FS. The infrastructure lender whose 2018 default froze India's credit markets and triggered years of clean-up.

- One of our worst governance failures, and the trigger for the NBFC crisis.

Its waste-management business was a real, working asset trapped inside a broken parent. The fund carved it out, and the deal helped cut IL&FS group debt by around Rs 1,200 crore.

Now, sit with that for a second.

A collapsed lender's orphaned assets. Re-capitalised by a climate fund. Backed by two governments. Now producing gas from Prayagraj's garbage and also running Asia's largest such plant in Indore.

This is what actually happens after a big Indian bankruptcy. The headlines scream fraud and default. Quietly, in the background, the useful bits get sold, cleaned up and put back to work.

The waste plants did not stop running because their owner failed. The garbage still needed processing. So the asset simply changed hands and carried on.

We obsess over the collapse. We rarely follow the resurrection.

But the second story matters just as much. It is how good assets survive bad owners in a market like India, and it is a quiet argument for why a working bankruptcy and resolution process is worth so much to a growing economy.

A broken owner should not mean a broken asset.