The right blend

The present biofuel policy is invitation to ecological disaster

Given the huge gap in the availability and requirement of ethanol for blending with petrol, the need to step up its production is indisputable. But the same cannot be said about some of the measures mooted by the government to achieve this objective. The most debatable among these is the permission granted to ethanol manufacturers — mostly sugar mills that produce it from their byproduct molasses — to convert sugarcane juice directly into alcohol and also use surplus sugar and foodgrains, such as wheat, rice and corn, for this purpose. Going a step further, the government has chosen to incentivise