Present study focuses on exploitation of agricultural waste wheat bran (WB) as growth medium for degradation of textile azo dye C.I. Reactive Blue 172 (RB 172) using a single bacterium P. rettgeri strain HSL1 (GenBank accession number JX853768.1). The bacterium was found to completely decolorize 50 mg L −1 of dye RB 172 within 20 h at 30 ± 0.2 ∘ C under microaerophilic incubation conditions. Additionally, significant reduction in COD (85%) and TOC (52%) contents of dye decolorized medium was observed which suggested its mineralization. Induction in the activities of azoreductase (159%) and NADH-DCIP reductase (88%) provided an evidence for reductive cleavage of dye RB 172. The HPLC, FTIR, and GC-MS analysis of decolorized products confirmed the degradation of dye into various metabolites. The proposed metabolic pathway for biodegradation of RB 172 has been elucidated which showed the formation of 2 intermediate metabolites, namely, 4-(ethenylsulfonyl) aniline and 1-amino-1-(4-aminophenyl) propan-2-one. The acute and phytotoxicity evaluation of degraded metabolites suggests that bacterial strain favors the detoxification of dye RB 172. Thus, WB could be utilized as a low-cost growth medium for the enrichment of bacteria and their further use for biodegradation of azo dyes and its derivatives containing wastes into nontoxic form.