India’s fuel-blending machine enters its next costly phase

Akshara· Host0:00

[upbeat music] In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about India's fuel blending machine entering its next costly phase, and then we'll talk about India's wet waste problem being a $50 billion opportunity. Welcome back to The Daily Briefing by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host, Akshara, and today is Thursday, 4th June. Coming to the first story. So on 29th May, the Road Transport Secretary of India, V. Umashankar, said that India is likely to bring a mandate for blending a biofuel named isobutanol into diesel later this year. A week before that, the Bureau of Indian Standards had notified fuel specifications for E22, E25, E27, and E30 petrol blends, all of which contain higher proportions of ethanol than the E20 that India currently uses. And then later this week, Maruti Suzuki is expected to launch India's first mass market flex fuel car that runs on any levels of ethanol, be it E20 or E100. All of these announcements took place within a span of a week. Some of these moves may have been in the works for years, but there's also an unmistakable sense of urgency involved. Now, we've covered India's ethanol blending program before. It dates back to a national policy on biofuels in 2018, and that policy has achieved a key milestone of 20% ethanol