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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Making Ethanol from Rice Hurts India’s Poor -Soma Marla

Making Ethanol from Rice Hurts India’s Poor -Soma Marla

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published Published on Jul 12, 2021   modified Modified on Jul 16, 2021

-Newsclick.in

Government must explore non-conventional resources to achieve energy security. Its current policy to blend ethanol and biodiesel helps the biofuel industry at the cost of food security.

In a recent press conference, the Union Food Secretary Sudhanshu Pandey said that in 2020-21 the Centre allocated about 78,000 tonnes of rice from the Food Corporation of India (FCI) stocks to distilleries to produce ethanol. The distilleries got rice at a subsidised Rs.20 per kg rate.

The National Biofuel Coordination Committee (NBCC), chaired by the Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, has decided to use the surplus rice with the FCI for conversion to ethanol. The ethanol will be blended with petrol or used to make alcohol-based sanitisers. 

These decisions may appear pragmatic, but they affront the millions deeply affected by food insecurity in the country, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These decisions seem to benefit a handful of corporations in the biofuel industry. Fossil fuels are the chief energy source today and are responsible for considerable emissions into the atmosphere, including greenhouse gases or GHGs that cause global warming. For this reason, too, the NBCC decision is hard to accept. 

To divert food crops to produce biofuel is unethical, especially considering India is still not distributing adequate food rations to those who need it. The urgent priority should be to transfer grain from godowns to ration shops to meet the high shortfall. It is admirable that after Independence, food grain production has increased six-fold in India and could cross nearly 310 million tonnes by the end of the 2021 Kharif season.

However, amidst the plenty, there exists a grave crisis of hunger. India has slipped nine places on the Global Hunger Index. It was 102nd among the 117 countries ranked in the 2019 index. The central food security scheme currently covers around 800 million people, or about 62% of the Indian population, but leaves out approximately 90 to 100 million poor. 

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) for 2015-16 found that 38.4% of children under five years are “stunted” or are lower in height for their age and 21% are “wasted” or have low weight for height. Over the ten years between NFHS-3 and NFHS-4, the prevalence of wasting increased from 19.8% to 21%.

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Newsclick.in, 12 July, 2021, https://www.newsclick.in/making-ethanol-rice-hurts-indias-poor?fbclid=IwAR0ckk6GVca8B9Iddxok0VFdZjdd2aiWw8ZRIHNkBU1bqsjyJT36fbEUQ5Y


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