Car owner accepts E20, but wants only basmati ethanol

The government's pursuit of energy security has hitched itself, parasite-like, to its own food security system. Paddy, procured under the minimum support price using taxpayers' money meant to reach the poor through the public distribution system, is milled into rice, and that rice is then sold to distillers at roughly 40% below its own procurement cost. Someone from the Ministry of Finance should learn from this economics. This is alchemy.The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, in a statement on July 31, clarified that the Ethanol Blended Petrol (EBP) programme does not compromise India's food security. It even reached back to 2023-24 to point out that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) rice was then only "a negligible share" of ethanol production, and reminded everyone that the programme has cumulatively saved the country, yes, a whopping Rs 1.97 lakh crore in forex.All true, possibly. But the statement sidestepped the one question that actually mattered: why is rice, bought under a food security scheme with taxpayers' money, being handed to distillers at a subsidised rate at all? Forex savings on one side of the books do not explain a discount on the other. The gormint answered a question nobody asked and skipped the one everybody did.India's ethanol math isn't mathing. Despite the great rice diversion Ever since I read the above article, my heartbroken heart has been burning like the broken rice being fermented to fuel our future. I wasn't worried when we were told it was mostly sugarcane and maize going into the vats. Now that I am better informed, I cannot be uninformed again, which is the central tragedy of reading the news on the India Today website. My beloved German car's engine is eating rice that could have fed a hungry family in some distant country whose name we invoke only when we want to feel guilty about our dinner.Doctors have long asked me to go easy on rice because of the glycemic index and what not, but having grown up in eastern India, no rice means no food for me, so I do partake my share, smaller portions, every single day. And I make sure it is the good stuff. I want the carbs that fuel me to be of a quality at par with the best parboiled rice going. Like my body, I take good care of the car that drives me to work and back too. So I went looking for petrol with little or no ethanol in it, because a good car, like a good annadata (farmer), deserves better than leftovers. I knew it would cost more, but a car you love is a car you pamper. I found nothing within a 30-km radius of where I live. More research later, I learnt of exactly one pump dispensing ethanol-free petrol, so far away that my tank would run dry just making the trip there and back, which is possibly the most on-brand outcome this entire programme could have produced.Let me be clear, my car is E20 compliant. It will run on E20 fuel, just with reduced mileage. It is not the preferred fuel for any existing internal combustion engine on the planet. Some cars survive E10, that is 10% ethanol, some survive E20, meaning 20%, but survival was never meant to be the standard we aspire to. The government, however, has left no option.Walk into any petrol pump near you, regular or premium, and the dispenser will hand you the same 20% adulterated fuel either way. A recent LocalCircles survey found that the share of vehicle owners reporting a mileage drop of over 10% jumped from 45% to 66% this year. The government’s own line is that E20-compliant engines, sold since 2009, should see no drop at all. Someone here is measuring mileage differently, and it is probably not the vehicle owners.You cannot fight the government forever in the name of constitutional rights, because those rights are vague enough to be argued away in a courtroom whose laws are drafted, passed and amended by a Parliament the government controls by majority, the way politicians happen to hold majority stakes in the very ethanol plants this blending feeds. The economics of the programme does not add up on its own, so when arithmetic fails to convince you, the government reaches for nationalism and precious forex savings instead, blackmail dressed up as patriotism, or as I like to call it, blackpill if blackmail alone will not do.So I, like millions of other Indians, have compromised and surrendered to an arbitrary blending programme, because the people are weak before a strong government they so deeply desire. But if I must surrender, let me at least surrender with a preference. I want my ethanol made from long grain basmati, not the broken rice currently being used. Ethanol from broken rice, as the name suggests, may well leave the car's heart broken too. Long grain, as the name suggests, might at least help it run a little longer.Where is the logic in that, you may ask. Where is the logic in the entire ethanol programme, I ask in return. Answer one question, and you will have answered both.(Kamlesh Singh, a columnist and satirist, is Tau of the popular Teen Taal podcast)- Ends(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)Published By: Avinash KateelPublished On: Aug 24, 2026 18:55 IST