The Nirvik Bureau, Bhubaneswar, 29 August 2026
The fuel tank has finally found its food group
India’s ethanol-blended petrol programme began as a tender welfare scheme for the sugar industry. Sugar mills were drowning in surplus, cane farmers were waiting for payments, and somebody in Delhi discovered that if the country could not eat all the sugar, it could at least drive around on it.
It was an elegant solution. The nation’s sweet excess would become vehicular virtue. Cars would run cleaner, mills would earn more, farmers would receive dues, and every petrol pump would quietly serve a small glass of industrial sugarcane cocktail to the engine.
But India, being India, could not leave a reasonably logical policy alone. The ethanol tail has now grown teeth, bought a steering wheel, and taken the dog on a cross-country ride.
From sugar support to rice-powered SUVs
The original logic was straightforward: use the leftovers of sugar production – molasses – to make ethanol. Then came B-heavy molasses, then cane juice, then sugar syrup, and soon the policy began behaving like a wedding caterer who discovers that the dessert counter can be converted into a diesel engine.
Now the sugarcane has been politely asked to move aside. Grain has entered the chat.
By 2023-24, nearly 60 per cent of ethanol was coming from grains. For the current supply year, grain-based sources have reportedly been allotted roughly 72.5 per cent of ethanol supplies. Sugarcane – whose distressed mills were supposedly the emotional centre of this programme – is being reduced to a supporting actor in a film titled Fast & Furious: The FCI Drift.
The Government of India has achieved something no marketing agency could have imagined: it has turned surplus rice into a premium petroleum additive.
A citizen may no longer afford biryani without checking the UPI balance, but their car can enjoy subsidised rice liquor at the pump. The country has found a new definition of food security: food shall remain secure inside the fuel tank.
FCI godowns: India’s newest oil fields
Why bother drilling for oil when you can drill into a Food Corporation of India godown?
The new energy frontier is not offshore exploration, solar parks, wind corridors or hydrogen laboratories. It is the majestic warehouse, where rice waits patiently for either a hungry citizen, a ration shop, a flood-relief camp – or, if policy ambition is sufficiently muscular, a Honda City.
FCI rice is reportedly being supplied to distilleries at rates far below ordinary retail rice prices. This is the kind of economic innovation that makes everyone feel included: the taxpayer pays to procure grain, pays to store grain, pays when it deteriorates, and then pays again when it is converted into petrol so that a car can consume what a human being might have preferred as lunch.
It is circular economy at its finest. Grain goes from field to godown to distillery to fuel tank, while public money goes from taxpayer pocket to somewhere so circular that it never returns.
E20 today, E30 tomorrow, Eaten? Never
The country has moved from E10 to E20 with the enthusiasm of a gym addict discovering protein powder. Standards for E22, E25, E27 and E30 are ready, presumably because numbers are cheaper than feedstock.
The logic is irresistible. If 20 per cent blending is good, surely 30 per cent is better. And if 30 per cent is better, why stop there? E100 has a certain patriotic ring to it. By then, every car can be converted into a mobile grain-storage facility, and every traffic jam can double as strategic food reserve management.
The minor inconvenience, of course, is that rice needs water. A great deal of it. But this should not trouble anyone. India has always treated groundwater as an ancient mythological resource: endlessly available until the day it becomes a documentary.
With El Niño threatening crops and maize supplies potentially tightening, rice becomes the dependable national sacrifice. The farmer grows it with water, the state buys it with money, the FCI stores it with hope, and the distiller burns it with efficiency.
Let the dog reclaim its leash
There is nothing wrong with ethanol itself. It can help cane growers, provide a market for maize and millets, reduce some import dependence, and make productive use of genuine agricultural by-products. But a programme designed to support sugarcane farmers should not mutate into a rice-to-race-car pipeline dependent on discounted public grain.
Millets such as bajra and jowar deserve the policy attention now lavished on godown rice. More importantly, blending targets should follow feedstock reality – not the other way around.
Because when the state begins feeding food grains to fuel targets, the engine is no longer serving the economy.
The economy is serving the engine.
