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On June 13 this year, Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari announced the legal recognition of 100 per cent ethanol as a transport fuel, allowing vehicles to run entirely on the biofuel. The following month, Gadkari revealed that plans are underway to convert ethanol to isobutanol, a biofuel that can be blended with diesel. These an-nouncements are in line with India’s effort to expand domestic ethanol production, with the twin aims of reducing crude oil imports and cutting carbon emissions, as set out in the National Policy on Biofuels.
India has already achieved its target of 20 per cent ethanol blending in petrol in 2025. According to a June 12 statement by the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, ethanol blending has helped India save over Rs 1.91 lakh crore in foreign exchange and substituted 30.2 million tonnes of crude oil imports. Lost in this enthusiasm, however, is an important question: what are the impacts of diverting land from food crops to fuel crops?
Currently, India relies on first-generation or 1G ethanol, produced from food crops. When the National Policy on Biofuels was introduced in 2018, sugarcane (molasses, juice and syrup) was the main feedstock for ethanol, with supplies secured from the sugar industry. However, its share in the ethanol supplied to oil marketing companies (OMCs) has plateaued, according to Shweta Saini, co-founder of Arcus Policy Research, a Delhi-based think tank. “In recent years, drought has occurred every three or four years, causing either sugarcane yields to fall or the crop’s sucrose content to decline,” says Saini…
This article was originally published in the July 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth