When India's government rolled out its ethanol-blending program, the official pitch was clean and patriotic: cut oil imports, reduce carbon emissions, support sugarcane farmers. The policy has since grown into one of the country's most significant energy interventions, with blending targets escalating from 10 percent to a mandated 20 percent under the E20 roadmap. What the brochure did not advertise was the architecture of concentrated benefit — a tight triangle of state refiners, licensed ethanol producers, and politically connected sugar mills — sitting at the top of a program that ordinary drivers fund through the pump.

Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav used unusually blunt language this week to describe what he sees as the arrangement's core logic. In a formal statement, he called ethanol blending "a new name for profiteering" and characterized it as "government-sanctioned adulteration" involving a three-way compact between the state, ethanol manufacturers, and oil marketing companies. Allegations from an opposition leader are, on their own, exactly that — allegations. But the structural critique they rest on is not invented, and it tracks with a set of technical and commercial grievances that have been accumulating for some time.

The most concrete source of friction is engine damage. Consumer complaints about E20 fuel degrading rubber seals, reducing mileage, and causing rough running in older vehicles have reached the point where at least one case resulted in a formal legal ruling — a consumer forum finding in favor of a vehicle owner who sought repair costs and compensation after E20 use. The automobile components industry has flagged through its own association that a jump to E25 blending levels would be premature, arguing that flex-fuel vehicle infrastructure needs to be built out before mandates outpace engineering reality. Brazil, which runs one of the world's most advanced ethanol programs and has spent decades calibrating its flex-fuel ecosystem, is the benchmark the Indian government frequently cites. What often goes unmentioned is how long Brazil took to get there, and how much of its success depends on domestic sugarcane economics that do not map cleanly onto India's supply chain.

On that supply chain: India imports a significant share of its ethanol feedstock from the United States, even while domestic production capacity exists. That arithmetic is worth sitting with. A program promoted as a path to energy self-reliance is, at its current operational scale, transferring foreign exchange to American corn and grain processors. The government has disputed the framing, pointing to domestic blending targets being met through Indian sugar mills. But the import dependency is a matter of public trade data, not spin.

The mileage question is not trivial and not propaganda. Ethanol contains less energy per liter than pure petrol — roughly 70 percent of the energy density, depending on the blend ratio. At E20, a vehicle running on a tank of blended fuel will, under standard combustion conditions, travel a measurable distance less than it would on unblended petrol. Consumers are paying the same price per liter at the pump and getting less range. The government's position is that the price differential between subsidized blended fuel and pure petrol offsets the mileage loss. Independent testing by automotive groups has produced mixed results, with older vehicles and two-wheelers showing the most significant degradation. Newer vehicles with engine management systems tuned for ethanol blends perform closer to spec.

Pure petrol — E0 — technically remains available at select stations under a carve-out for high-performance and classic vehicles, but access is uneven, pricing is higher, and availability is not guaranteed across the retail network. For millions of two-wheeler owners in smaller cities and rural areas, E20 is effectively the only option. That demographic skew — the program's costs landing heaviest on lower-income, older-vehicle owners while its revenue flows to a small set of licensed producers — is the political core of the SP's attack, and it is not a frivolous one.

Nitin Gadkari, the Union Minister whose portfolio covers road transport and whose name is most associated with the alternative-fuel push, has continued to argue the bigger vision: Brazil-scale biofuel integration, eventually hydrogen, eventually aviation biofuel. His recent public comments have moved on to discussing aerial transport concepts. The gap between that horizon and the immediate reality of damaged fuel injectors in a 2009 motorcycle is where the policy's credibility problem lives.

None of this means the blending program is without merit or should be abandoned. The case for reducing crude oil import dependence is real — India imports roughly 85 percent of its oil needs, a structural vulnerability with serious foreign exchange and geopolitical consequences. Carbon reduction through blending is marginal but not zero. The question is whether those genuine benefits are being used to provide political and regulatory cover for a procurement and pricing arrangement that concentrates gains at the top. That question deserves a straight answer from the government, not a pivot to flying buses.