10,000 litres water for one litre ethanol: India's fuel push to worsen water crisis

India's total ethanol production capacity stands at 1,822 crore litres, with a disproportionate share concentrated in already water-stressed states like Delhi and Maharashtra.

In Short

• Rice requires up to 10,000 litres of water per litre of ethanol
• Water tables in major cities like Delhi may run dry by 2030
• Farmers face losses as maize prices fall due to rice ethanol focus

India’s push to mix ethanol with petrol, something pitched as a clean energy fix, is deepening the country’s water crisis.

At the heart of the problem are crops that already drink more water than almost anything else grown in India, like maize, sugarcane, and the country's favourite grain, rice.

"Ethanol blending can worsen India’s water crisis mainly because most of the raw material—sugarcane and increasingly maize—is extremely water-intensive to grow and process," said IPCC author Anjal Prakash.

WHAT IS ETHANOL BLENDING AND WHAT DOES RICE DO?

Ethanol blending means mixing a plant-based alcohol, called ethanol, into petrol to reduce India’s dependence on imported crude oil.

The country has been aggressively scaling this programme, and rice has become a key raw material. The government allocated 52 lakh tonnes of rice for ethanol production in 2024-25, and is now targeting 90 lakh tonnes in 2025-26.

To free up this grain, it plans to reduce the share of broken rice distributed to the poor under the public distribution system from 25% to 10%, diverting the savings straight to distilleries to be used to facilitate ethanol blending.

HOW WILL ETHANOL BLENDING AFFECT WATER?

Data can adequately illustrate the issue with ethanol blending.

Producing one litre of ethanol from rice requires around 10,790 litres of water, including water used for irrigation during cultivation, according to Food Secretary Sanjeev Chopra, who shared the data at a global conference in Delhi in 2024.

By comparison, maize requires about 4,670 litres and sugarcane around 3,630 litres per litre of ethanol.

The conversion ratio makes this worse. One kilogram of rice requires roughly 3,000 litres of water to grow, yet one tonne of rice yields only about 470 litres of ethanol, making rice one of the most water-intensive fuel sources imaginable.

"Ethanol mills also generate large volumes of wastewater (vinasse), which can pollute surface and groundwater if not treated properly," said Prakash.

The story was first reported by Om Prakash, Editor, Kisan Tak, who pointed out a stark contrast: when a farmer grows 1 kg of rice, using around 3,000 to 5,000 litres of water, they are often blamed for depleting resources. Yet, he noted, industries consume more than 10,000 litres of water to produce just one litre of ethanol. “The industry is never blamed for the water crisis,” he said.

You can read the Kisan Tak report here.

INDIA IS ALREADY RUNNING OUT OF WATER

The push for ethanol blending is happening against a deeply alarming backdrop.

NITI Aayog’s Composite Water Management Index (CWMI) has warned that by 2030, groundwater in 21 major cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru, and Chennai, could reach zero.

India’s total ethanol production capacity stands at 1,822 crore litres, with a disproportionate share concentrated in already water-stressed states.

Maharashtra, for instance, hosts plants with a combined capacity of 396 crore litres, even as farmers in Vidarbha and Marathwada struggle for drinking water.

Meanwhile, ethanol plants in Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka are drawing from the same groundwater reserves that have been flagged as critically depleted.

Although the use of rice in ethanol blending in India is still nascent, the nation depends primarily on the use of sugarcane. But sugarcane, too, takes a toll on the water, consuming 3,636 litres of water for a single litre of ethanol.

"Several of the ethanol plants are located in sugarcane cultivating regions due to easy access to feedstock," said Swathi Seshadri, an energy specialist with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

"Years of sugarcane cultivation has already stressed the water tables in these regions with the ethanol plants exacerbating the situation."

Furthermore, sugarcane is cultivated largely in states like Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, where groundwater stress is already severe, raising concerns that scaling cane-based ethanol could further aggravate water scarcity.

Similarly, for years, farmers in Punjab and Haryana were blamed for depleting groundwater. Now those same crops are being used to make fuel at an industrial scale and is being called green energy.

The contradiction is hard to ignore. What's even harder to ignore is the prospect of India's cities facing acute water shortages, affecting millions.

- Ends