Rama Krishna Sangem
Union Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Piyush Goyal on May 2, Tuesday expressed confidence that the country will achieve the target of 20 per cent blending of ethanol with petrol by 2025 and asserted that maize crop will play an important role in implementation of this programme.
Addressing a national seminar on maize to ethanol, Goyal said ethanol is a “sunrise sector” and asked the industry to set up factories for manufacturing of this green fuel which can operate on dual feed stock (sugarcane and food grains, according to PTI news.
The minister highlighted that the blending of ethanol with petrol has increased to 10 per cent in 2021-22 marketing year from just 1.53 per cent in 2013-14 on the back of efforts made by farmers and industry, aided by favourable government policies. Increase in mixing of ethanol with petrol will have multiple advantages. First is sugarcane farmers will get good price for their produce.
Second is revival of most sugar factories that were shut over the years, due to problems of sugar industry. Thirdly, the quality of petrol will go up and levels of pollution too will come down. This is one of our pledges at the global levels, to minimize pollution through petrol. The cost of petrol too will be under control as ethanol will be produced locally, while imported crude oil share will be limited to just 80 per cent, cut by 10 per cent from now.
But, a major problem of this announcement is that India has already crossed the deadlines set for this purpose. Though we have an ambitious goal of mixing 20 per cent of petrol with ethanol, required arrangements and preparations haven’t been made. As a result, India’s oil import bill continues to be third largest after the US and China. Piyush Goyal has earlier told the UN agencies that this ethanol goal will be met by 2020, but we failed.
