Of sugar highs and water lows |
Think one day at a time. This was the strategy of farmers to stay afloat in Takwiki village, in Maharashtra’s drought-prone Dharashiv district in the summer of 2013. A crippling water scarcity devastated its economy, driving people out in search of work and water.
Three more devastating droughts have since ravaged Marathwada region in which Takwiki falls, and each time, some of its people left the village and translocated to other places.
That year, Maharashtra crushed 80 million tonnes of cane to produce 8 million quintals of sugar. Sugar mills in Dharashiv crushed over 25 lakh tonnes of sugar-cane — a record.
In my successive trips to this village and tens of others in this rain-shadow, low-rainfall, arid region of the state, one paradox stood out: villages that clamour for tankers to supply drinking water grow tonnes of water-guzzling sugarcane for the state’s sugar daddies. This, in a changing climate.
Year after year, they dig deep borewells to extract groundwater to irrigate cane crops, feeding factories that produce millions of tonnes of sugar and now ethanol, while a large section of people, especially in summer, are crying themselves hoarse for drinking water during drought years.
A few years ago, a geologist at the Maharashtra government Groundwater Surveys and Development Agency (GSDA) told me that Marathwada was sucking water from the palaeolithic age to grow orchards and cultivate sugarcane. The crisis is that serious.
In 2013, when the harangued district collector wrote to chief minister Prithviraj Chavan pleading for the suspension of the Diwali-to-March crushing season to preserve water for drinking needs, the entire political class was up in arms against him. He was snubbed, and transferred. People went without water, were forced to buy cans and packaged water by shelling out astronomical sums, but sugar mills worked round the clock, using millions of litres of water to produce the sweetener.
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Cut to 2026. The water crisis has worsened, yet the Centre wants to push for vehicles to run on 100 per cent ethanol — produced by sugar factories — to tide over fuel shortages in the aftermath of the war in West Asia. It intends to amend the regulatory framework for mills, bringing ethanol into the framework in addition to sugar, molasses and other byproducts. This year, more of Maharashtra’s sugarcane will not become sugar, but ethanol — fuel for India’s vehicles.
The shift is part of India’s aim to achieve, over time, 100 per cent ethanol blending in petrol. Oil marketing companies are expanding procurement and sugar mills across Maharashtra are rapidly adding distillation capacity. What was once a by-product — molasses — has now become a central economic driver.
For five years, the Centre and states have, through policy tweaks, incentivised private and cooperative sugar factories to invest heavily in ethanol production. But in a state where water is already contested, the ethanol story is not just about energy. It is about how water is being used — and who decides.
Last week, the Modi-government took a step toward enabling cars in India to run entirely on ethanol. Under........