India’s 20% ethanol blending milestone, the sugar shortfall that arrived in the same season, and how much the two have to do with each other.
India hit 20% ethanol blending five years early. In the same season sugar production fell to a five-year low and retail price jumped from ₹48 to ₹56 a kilo in a single month.
The site exists to ask whether those two facts are connected — and how much. It does not answer the question for you.
Red rot in Uttar Pradesh, top borer and waterlogging in Maharashtra cut gross production to 306 LMT against domestic consumption of about 285 — a margin thin enough that a bad month matters.
⚠ 306 LMT (Ministry) vs 343.5 LMT (ISMA) — both still circulating
Stock verification at mills, a dealer stock limit, a bulk-consumer cap, a duty-free import quota, a customs exemption to give it effect, a processing-deadline relaxation, an early crushing season — five of the nine land between 19 and 21 August.
For its first decade the programme barely moved — supply was unreliable and administered prices too low to justify building a distillery. Interest-subvention schemes financed 368 new projects, and differential pricing made the B-heavy and juice routes worth taking.
From 1 April 2026, E20 is the sole standard petrol grade (S.O. 860(E), 17 February 2026).
In 2019-20, nine litres in ten came from sugarcane. By ESY 2024-25, grain supplied 69% of the ethanol reaching oil marketing companies — 718 crore litres against 321 from cane.
It relieved pressure on sugar and transferred it onto maize, damaged foodgrain and surplus FCI rice. India became a net maize importer in 2024 for the first time in decades, and 52 LMT of FCI rice went to ethanol in each of the last two supply years.
The mill’s first decision is chemical, not political: how much sucrose to crystallise, and how much to leave for the distillery next door. Three routes, three very different prices.
Per tonne of cane. Every 100 kg of fermentable sugar yields about 60 litres of ethanol.
Which is roughly the size of the shortfall that opened the import window. That is the critics’ central arithmetic — and it is arithmetic, not proof of cause.
A litre of cane ethanol carries about 3,000 litres of embedded irrigation water. Maize carries about 4,670; FCI rice more than 10,000. Per hectare the ranking reverses — which is why both framings keep appearing in the same argument.
The prototype for this site showed grain as the water-cheap option. On the sourced coefficients, it is not. The sources won.
We take no position on whether E20 was worth it. The job is narrower: put the government’s numbers and its critics’ numbers side by side, mark every place they disagree, and cite all of it. Every chart has a data table. Every figure has a source. Where two credible bodies publish different values, you see a ⚠ and both numbers — nothing is averaged and no side is chosen for the reader.
Rather than argue the trade-off, the last section hands over the dials. Move any one and every downstream number recomputes from published coefficients — sugar forgone, closing stock, import need, forex saved, crude substituted, CO₂ avoided, and the water bill.
No backend, no database, no runtime API. The whole site is files on a CDN.
Site chrome and every SVG chart ship zero JavaScript. Only three things hydrate, all on visibility: two Chart.js canvases, the simulator, and the scrollytelling binding. The theme toggle, share button, glossary panel and disclaimer modal were pulled out of React entirely — react-dom alone is 56 KB gzipped.
Values that are derived rather than published carry a confidence field and are drawn hollow or dashed wherever they appear. Accessibility failures block the build; the performance score warns. Every gate runs in CI.
Representational and educational use only. Not official data. Not affiliated with any government department, industry body or company named in it.
10 routes · 9 charts · 51 sources · data as of 27 August 2026
Where the design and the sources disagreed, the sources won. Where the specification contradicted itself, the user-facing guarantee won. Both are written down.