Picture a farmer in Punjab. Five acres. Twenty years growing wheat and vegetables. Some years good, some years the price collapses and he barely breaks even.
Then the government announces a new policy. Grow sugarcane or maize for ethanol — the government guarantees a fixed buying price. Not a market price that fluctuates. A guaranteed price. Every year. Regardless of what happens globally.
Put yourself in his shoes. Would you keep growing food crops — where prices are uncertain, where a bad monsoon can wipe out your year — or switch to the crop the government has promised to buy? You would switch. Any rational person would.
And that is exactly what is beginning to happen across India's farmlands. Slowly. Quietly. Without making headlines.
A problem that already existed before ethanol
To understand why this matters, you need to know something about how Indian farming actually works today. Something most city-dwellers have no idea about.
Every plant needs three things from the soil: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium — farmers call this NPK. Without the right balance, nothing grows. Not rice, not wheat, not vegetables, not sugarcane.
| Nutrient | Where India gets it | The vulnerability |
|---|---|---|
| 🟡 Nitrogen (N) | Made using natural gas — imported from Russia, Qatar, Gulf | Ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz — a 33 km bottleneck between Iran and Oman |
| 🟠 Phosphorus (P) | Ancient rock deposits — Morocco controls 70% of world reserves | India has 31 million tonnes. Morocco has 50 billion. One country. One resource. |
| 🟣 Potassium (K) | Prehistoric ocean beds — Canada, Russia, Belarus control 70% | India has zero potash reserves. Not a small amount. Zero. |
🌾 What this means: The food on your plate exists because India is continuously importing the chemicals that make soil fertile enough to grow it. The supply chain behind every meal in India passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
The 280 times problem
Here is a number that should stop you in your tracks.
Five times more food. Two hundred and eighty times more fertilizer.
The soil has become weaker over the decades. In 1951, healthy soil needed little help. Today, it must be pushed harder and harder just to produce the same result. Like an engine that once ran on one litre of petrol but now needs three to go the same distance.
When the soil doctor becomes the patient
Think of your soil like a human body that needs a balanced diet. The ideal NPK ratio for Indian soil is 4:2:1. Here is what Punjab — the state that feeds a large portion of India — is actually applying:
Nearly eight times more nitrogen than the soil can use. The excess nitrogen does not disappear. It does three damaging things:
So what does this have to do with ethanol?
Everything.
India's agriculture is already fragile — degraded soil, imported fertilizers, slowing yields. Now layer the ethanol programme on top of this system. It creates guaranteed purchase prices for sugarcane, maize, and rice — the main crops used to produce ethanol. For a farmer with uncertain food crop prices, this guarantee is extremely attractive.
A farmer has five acres. He is deciding what to grow next season. Here is what his two options actually look like:
The predictable result: farmers start shifting land from food crops to fuel crops. And millions of farmers making that same rational choice, all at once, creates a food supply problem nobody is talking about at E85 launch events.
The rice that went into fuel tanks instead of kitchens
5.2 million metric tonnes of rice can feed tens of millions of people for a year. That rice did not go to a hungry family. It went into a distillery to produce fuel for vehicles.
The logic offered is that these are "surplus grains" — that India has more than it needs. But surplus grain is not waste. It is a buffer against drought, flood, or a geopolitical event that cuts off the Strait of Hormuz and collapses India's fertilizer supply. When that buffer is converted into petrol substitute, there is nothing left to fall back on.
The trap that closes slowly
The cruellest part of this entire situation is how invisible it is while it is happening.
When a farmer shifts from moong dal to maize for ethanol, nothing dramatic happens on day one. The village looks the same. The mandis still have food. The government announces another blending milestone and calls it a green revolution.
But underground, the soil accumulates more nitrogen imbalance each year. The groundwater table drops a little further — sugarcane needs 2,500 to 3,000 litres of water to produce just one litre of ethanol. The diversity of food grown slowly narrows. Pulses disappear. Oilseeds disappear. Vegetables get more expensive.
This is not a hypothetical risk. This is the structural direction the current policy is building toward. Not quickly. Not dramatically. But steadily and measurably.
What a balanced path actually looks like
None of this means ethanol has no role. The honest case exists — it reduces crude import dependency, provides guaranteed income to sugar cooperatives, and at the exhaust pipe level reduces certain pollutants in city air. The problem is scale without safeguards.
The question India needs to answer before scaling E85 to 5,000 pumps by 2027
If we run out of food, what do we do?
India has built an ethanol programme that looks like energy security on a press release and looks like a food and soil crisis in a soil sample report.
- Every litre of E85 carries a cost that does not appear on the price board at the pump — measured in aquifers that drop a little further, in NPK ratios that drift further from balance, and in FCI warehouses that are lighter each year.
- The 18% GST advantage on ethanol never reaches the consumer. The ₹20 per litre discount is funded by the same petrol taxes that pay for everything else. It is a loop, not a saving.
- Farmland that switches from food to fuel crops does not switch back easily. When the policy changes — as all policies eventually do — the farmers who responded to the incentive are left exposed.
- India ranks 105th on the Global Hunger Index. Before scaling a food-grain-to-fuel programme to 5,000 pumps, that number deserves to be on the banner at the launch event.
- Nobody at those launches shows the other side of the ledger. This series was an attempt to do that.
This article is the final part of RealOnRoad's investigative fuel series — no sponsored content, no industry bias. Built in Kerala. 🇮🇳