Congress attacks E20 rollout, cites water and food security concerns

The Congress intensified its criticism of the Centre's E20 fuel rollout, alleging it threatens water resources and food security. Jairam Ramesh argued India's ethanol production depends on water-intensive crops, making the policy environmentally unsustainable despite claims of cleaner energy

New Delhi: Stepping up its attack on the government over the E20 fuel rollout, the Congress on Thursday said the motivations behind the move were clearly not environmental and asserted that a genuinely “green” fuel policy must account for the entire ecological footprint of the fuel it promotes.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the Modi government is billing the hurried nationwide rollout of E20 fuel as a step towards cleaner energy and lower oil imports, but a holistic assessment of its ecological impact must account for E20’s impact on water resources and food security.

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While other countries largely produce ethanol from agricultural residues and other waste biomass, India’s ethanol production relies primarily on sugarcane, rice, and maize, Ramesh pointed out.

“The stress these water-intensive crops place on our resources is alarming: Sugarcane and paddy together consume nearly 70 per cent of India’s irrigation water. One litre of sugarcane-based ethanol requires around 3,630 litres of water. One litre of rice-based ethanol can consume up to 10,790 litres of water,” he said.

The Congress leader further pointed out that even maize-based ethanol requires roughly 4,670 litres of water per litre of fuel. These figures are particularly worrying as groundwater levels continue to decline across large parts of India, Ramesh said.

Even the NITI Aayog’s 2021 ethanol roadmap recognised the need to transition towards more sustainable feedstocks, he pointed out. “But the Modi government in fact subsidises the use of rice for ethanol production — it recently admitted in Parliament that it supplies rice to ethanol distilleries at nearly 40 per cent below its average procurement cost,” the Congress general secretary in-charge of communications said.

A genuinely “green” fuel policy must account for the entire ecological footprint of the fuel it promotes, Ramesh asserted. The motivations for E20 are clearly not environmental, he added. The Congress had on Wednesday alleged that the rollout of E20 petrol has deprived middle-class Indians of choice, saddled them with higher fuel bills, and damaged the vehicles they had saved for years to purchase.

The opposition party had claimed ethanol producers were the only beneficiaries of the E20 rollout and asserted that people are demanding accountability and transparency over the nationwide introduction of the fuel, but the Modi government’s ministers have failed to convince anyone of its harmlessness because no real data or reports exist.