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21 August 2024 at 10:20:16 am

Thirsty Metropolis

Barely a year after torrential rains submerged large parts of Mumbai’s, the city’s water sources have fallen to critical levels and water rationing has returned. This year, a bad monsoon has led to Mumbai’s reservoirs falling to barely 9 percent of its capacity, forcing water cuts across India’s financial capital. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has halted supplies to construction sites and swimming pools, and tightened restrictions on commercial users. Predictably, the...

Thirsty Metropolis

Barely a year after torrential rains submerged large parts of Mumbai’s, the city’s water sources have fallen to critical levels and water rationing has returned. This year, a bad monsoon has led to Mumbai’s reservoirs falling to barely 9 percent of its capacity, forcing water cuts across India’s financial capital. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has halted supplies to construction sites and swimming pools, and tightened restrictions on commercial users. Predictably, the politicians blame a delayed monsoon. But blaming the weather alone is convenient and wrong. Mumbai’s water woes are not merely a meteorological problem but the result of decades of political complacency and administrative neglect. Mumbai receives roughly 2,000 mm of rainfall annually. Few global cities are blessed with such abundance. Yet, every year the city oscillates between flooding and scarcity, unable to capture excess water when the skies open and unable to conserve enough when they do not. Mumbai consumes around 4,000 million litres of water daily. More than 900 million litres of treated water reportedly disappear through leakages and illegal connections every day. Non-revenue water losses have climbed above 30 percent, substantially higher than they were fifteen years ago. In other words, the city loses more water through inefficiency than the size of its official supply deficit. Instead, successive administrations have preferred to search for another reservoir farther away. From Vihar in the nineteenth century to Tulsi, Tansa and eventually the Vaitarna system, the city’s answer to rising demand has always been to extend its hydraulic empire.
Such an approach may have worked when Mumbai was smaller. Today, it looks increasingly fragile in an era of climate volatility as a weak monsoon now threatens millions. Meanwhile, local water sources have been allowed to decay. The Mithi River, once a functioning ecosystem, has become an open drain carrying untreated sewage and industrial waste. Wetlands that naturally stored and filtered water have steadily shrunk under developmental pressure. Wells and ponds that historically provided resilience have largely disappeared from public policy. The tragedy is that Mumbai possesses solutions that it refuses to deploy at scale. Rainwater harvesting has been mandatory for many buildings for more than two decades. Yet enforcement remains patchy enough for corporators to demand audits of compliance. Wastewater reuse offers another missed opportunity. Mumbai treats only a fraction of the sewage it generates. The city that pioneered industrial water recycling in India during the 1960s has somehow failed to make reuse central to its twenty-first-century water strategy. India’s financial capital cannot continue treating every dry spell as an unforeseen emergency. Climate change will make rainfall even more erratic in future. In truth, Mumbai does not suffer from a lack of water. It suffers from a lack of imagination. Until politicians focus less on announcing new projects and more on reviving wetlands, harvesting rain and recycling wastewater, every monsoon will remain a gamble.

From Green Fuel to Strategic Fuel

India’s ethanol revolution will succeed only if its costs are shared more fairly.

On June 13, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari approved regulations giving E100 fuel legal status in India. The move does more than add two new fuel grades to India’s pumps. It marks the evolution of ethanol from a green fuel and sugar-surplus solution into a strategic fuel designed to reduce India’s exposure to external energy shocks.


For over a decade, the older version of the ethanol programme delivered real, measurable gains. Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri said on June 4 that the ethanol blending programme has saved India Rs. 1.84 lakh crore in foreign exchange and added Rs. 1.58 lakh crore to farmers’ earnings since 2014-15, while substituting 302 lakh metric tonnes of crude oil and cutting 909 lakh metric tonnes of CO2 emissions.


The new policy answers a harder question. India imports around 85 percent of its crude oil requirements. Tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil moves, keep reminding policymakers what that dependence costs. Gadkari has put India’s annual fossil fuel import bill at roughly Rs. 22 lakh crore, near $250 billion at current exchange rates. Every litre of ethanol that replaces imported crude is a small subtraction from that bill and a small addition to India’s room to manoeuvre when oil prices spike. That logic is sound. The fairness of the transition is a separate question.


Uneven Costs

Energy security is a public good: a steadier rupee, lower inflation and reduced reliance on oil exporters benefit the entire economy. Yet the costs are far less evenly shared. The immediate winners are sugar-producing states, distilleries and the government, which enjoys a lower import bill and greater diplomatic flexibility.


Nor is the environmental case as straightforward as the carbon figures suggest. Producing a litre of sugarcane-based ethanol requires about 2,860 litres of water, according to NITI Aayog. Most ethanol comes from sugarcane and maize grown in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab - states already overexploiting groundwater. Ethanol is also competing with food and feed. Maize prices have risen as distilleries compete with the poultry industry, while India has shifted from being a maize exporter to an importer. The Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy estimates that meeting ethanol targets by 2030 could require additional maize acreage equivalent to a quarter of India’s farmland. In Rajasthan’s Tibbi, farmers have already protested against a new ethanol plant.


A cleaner path exists. Second-generation ethanol made from paddy straw, sugarcane bagasse and other crop waste does not compete with food or fresh water the same way first-generation ethanol does. India has a handful of 2G plants running, including one at Panipat, but high capital costs and slow technology adoption keep them marginal next to sugarcane and grain-based ethanol.


E85 and E100 need flex-fuel vehicles built for higher ethanol shares. Maruti Suzuki and Hero MotoCorp have begun rolling out flex-fuel models, but as of April this year no automaker had a vehicle commercially available that ran on E85, and Maruti’s own flex-fuel prototype only appeared in June. Neither company has disclosed what the flex-fuel variants will cost against standard petrol models.


The fuel itself is cheaper at the pump. Delhi’s first E85 station, opened on June 5 at Indian Oil’s Pusa Road outlet, priced the fuel at Rs. 82.12 a litre, about Rs. 20 below regular E20 petrol. But ethanol carries less energy than petrol, and E85 cuts mileage by 20 to 35 percent compared with petrol. A cheaper litre that takes you fewer kilometres is not automatically a cheaper kilometre. Gadkari has asked the finance ministry to cut GST on E85 from 18 percent to 5 percent, which would help close that gap. The GST Council has not decided yet, and its decision in the coming weeks will tell us whether the government means to share the cost of this transition or leave it with early adopters.


There is a fiscal cost behind the consumer one. Oil marketing companies are set to pay farmers close to Rs. 40,000 crore in 2025 alone under the blending programme, on top of the subsidies and soft loans that prop up ethanol distilleries.


Infrastructure tells a similar story. The government’s rollout plan covers Delhi-NCR and the Mumbai-Pune-Nagpur corridor first, with a target of 500 E85 outlets by December 2026 and 5,000 by the end of 2027. A household outside those corridors that buys a flex-fuel vehicle today pays for infrastructure it cannot yet use.


This is where the comparison with E20 matters. The earlier blending programme spread its costs thinly across every petrol buyer in the country, through a few percentage points of ethanol nobody had to think about or pay extra for. E85 and E100 work differently. They ask a smaller group of early adopters to absorb a vehicle upgrade, a pricing gap and an infrastructure lag all at once, in exchange for a national benefit every taxpayer will eventually share.


Fairer Transition

None of this is an argument against E85 and E100. India needs to cut its dependence on imported crude, and ethanol is the most realistic domestic substitute on the table right now. The environmental costs of first-generation ethanol are real too. The question is who absorbs its costs, and what kind of ethanol pays for it.


The transition can be made fairer in four ways: extend any GST cut on E85 to flex-fuel vehicles; link vehicle sales to the availability of E85 pumps; require automakers to disclose price premiums and real-world mileage; and shift more incentives towards second-generation ethanol that does not strain water tables or food supplies.


For a decade, India’s ethanol programme delivered foreign-exchange savings and higher farm incomes without imposing visible costs on consumers or water-stressed regions. E85 and E100 change that equation. They turn a public good - energy security - into an upfront private cost borne first by households and farming regions, while the wider benefits are shared by the country as a whole.


 (The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

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