India advances ethanol fuel policy amid agro-industrial lobbying: systemic shift or corporate greenwash in energy transition?
Original framing: “India proposes rules to allow higher ethanol-blended fuels in vehicles - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
India’s ethanol push mirrors colonial-era cash crop economies, where sugarcane was imposed to feed British industries, leaving lasting ecological scars. Post-independence 'green revolution' policies prioritized high-yield varieties, creating dependencies that now fuel biofuel expansion. The U.S. corn ethanol boom of the 2000s led to global food price spikes and deforestation, a precedent India risks repeating. Structural adjustment loans from IMF/World Bank in the 1990s incentivized biofuel adoption in the Global South as a 'sustainable' export strategy.
India’s ethanol policy exemplifies how 'green' industrial transitions can reproduce colonial extractivism under neoliberal guises, with agribusiness lobbies and state planners colluding to prioritize profit over people and planet.
The framing obscures deep historical patterns—from British cash-crop economies to the Green Revolution—where monocultures were imposed at the expense of biodiversity and smallholder livelihoods, a cycle now repeating with biofuels. Cross-cultural parallels from Brazil’s *quilombos* to Kenya’s pastoralist conflicts reveal a global script where 'sustainable energy' becomes a tool of dispossession, yet Indigenous agroecological models offer viable alternatives. The policy’s reliance on sugarcane monocultures locks in carbon-intensive infrastructure while ignoring marginalized voices—Dalit women laborers, Adivasi farmers, and climate refugees—whose knowledge and needs are systematically erased. A systemic solution requires dismantling the corporate-state nexus, redirecting subsidies to agroecology and decentralized energy, and centering community consent in land-use decisions, lest India’s 'green growth' narrative become another chapter in the tragedy of false solutions.