10% Biofuel Blended Biodiesel Coming Soon: Nitin Gadkari
This announcement comes in the backdrop of India’s growing automobile sector, which has recently overtaken Japan to become the world’s third-largest car market. While the industry is a major contributor to GST and provides employment to over 4.5 crore people, it also accounts for nearly 40 percent of air pollution by some estimates. The shift to biodiesel is being positioned as a necessary countermeasure, with isobutanol also being explored as a diesel alternative.
Gadkari pointed to one success already seen from the current biofuel push: the reduction in stubble burning. Farmers are increasingly supplying agricultural waste like rice straw for biofuel production, reducing air pollution and creating new income streams in rural areas.
Progress and Bottlenecks in Biodiesel Adoption
The National Policy on Biofuels (2018) set a target of 5 percent biodiesel blending with diesel by 2030. However, current blending levels remain low, reportedly around 0.6 percent in FY25. Gadkari’s statement about the upcoming 10 percent biodiesel blend appears to be a step toward fast-tracking this goal, though implementation remains uneven.
Meeting the 5 percent blending goal alone will require around ₹2,500 crore in investment, according to industry estimates. Key hurdles include limited infrastructure, inadequate incentives, and poor collection of used cooking oil – an essential raw material for biodiesel. Companies with integrated edible oil processing capacity are better placed to scale up biodiesel production, but wider sectoral participation is still lacking.
Linking Biofuels to Rural Prosperity
For Gadkari, the biofuel narrative is not just environmental. He repeatedly positioned it as an economic strategy to revitalise India’s rural economy. The Minister cited ethanol production from maize as a successful case study, where the shift in agricultural demand led to maize prices doubling from ₹1,200 to ₹2,600 per quintal.
He introduced the “4 Es” framework—Ecology, Environment, Economy, and Ethics—to highlight how agriculture can be integrated into the energy value chain. He argued that if the agricultural GDP, currently at 12 to 14 percent, could match the industrial sector’s contribution, it would not only reduce India’s energy import bill (currently around 85 percent dependent on imports) but also redirect wealth towards farming communities.
