The Government Diluted Your Petrol and Kept the Change

Your petrol is now one-fifth ethanol, your mileage is down 3 to 5%, and the pump price is down exactly 0%. The additive costs more than the fuel it is diluting.

The question, for the Government of India

Who is this policy actually for? Not the driver paying full price for diluted fuel. Not the maize farmer selling ₹600 to ₹800 below MSP. Kindly name the beneficiary and show the arithmetic. Ours took one evening, one spreadsheet and zero committees, and we will gladly email it.

Sub Judice (SC) · Reply Awaited

The record, by exhibit

The 20% ethanol deadline was pulled forward by five years, from 2030 to ESY 2025-26, and from 1 April 2026 E20 became the mandated petrol nationwide. The government's stated reason for not also stocking ordinary petrol is that there are over one lakh retail outlets and offering a choice at all of them would be inconvenient. Over 23 crore vehicles now run on E20, and the government concedes this includes a large number built before E20 certification existed. Nobody asked a single owner. The consent form was a notification.
By the government's own roadmap the efficiency loss runs from 1 to 2% for cars actually calibrated for E20, up to 6 to 7% for cars designed for neat petrol. Its current line is 3 to 5%. The pump price fell by exactly 0%. You buy a litre that is one-fifth ethanol, you travel less far on it, and you pay the full petrol rate for the privilege. This is the first surcharge in recorded history levied on patriotism and collected at the nozzle.
Oil companies buy that ethanol at ₹57.97 a litre from C-heavy molasses, ₹60.73 from B-heavy, ₹65.61 from cane juice and ₹71.86 from maize, with GST and transport extra, in order to dilute petrol whose base cost is ₹34 to ₹55. Read that twice. The additive costs more than the thing being adulterated. Somewhere in a ministry there is a slide explaining why this is clever, and it is the most expensive slide in India.
The savings are real, and they are not yours: ₹1,13,007 crore of foreign exchange as on 31 December 2024, which the government had revised up to ₹1.97 lakh crore by July 2026. None of it reached your tank. Meanwhile the maize farmer on the promotional poster was selling at ₹1,600 to ₹1,800 against an MSP of ₹2,400, per the Chief Minister of Karnataka's own letter to the Prime Minister, while the distilleries collected 5% GST and soft loans. The windfall arrived precisely on schedule. It simply gave a different delivery address.
June 2026: Al Jazeera and others reported that the Attorney General had told the Supreme Court the government was “experimenting” with E20. His office called the reports entirely false, saying no such submission was ever made and that the hearing concerned BPCL's ethanol allocation rather than E20 policy at all. Accepted, and noted. Meanwhile a separate PIL asking only that pumps be required to disclose what is actually in the fuel has been live before the court since July 2026. The government is contesting that one too. Whichever version of the AG you believe, the policy is consistent: you may not know what you are buying.
(The Congress, through Pawan Khera, alleges a conflict of interest in Minister Gadkari's sons' ethanol businesses, noting that Cian Agro's revenue rose from ₹18 crore in June 2024 to ₹523 crore in June 2025. Gadkari denies it flatly: no role in operations or pricing, the family's share of India's ethanol market under 0.5%, his own share of ethanol production 0.07%, the charge “completely baseless”. Unproven, so the allegation is filed, the denial is stapled to it, and the question below is deliberately not that one. We do not need it.)

The citations, in full

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