arbiter
JournalsAccount

Leading by Blending: The Political Ecology of Rapid Transition

Rohith Jyothish

Economic and Political Weekly2026https://doi.org/10.71279/epw.v61i5.46613article
ABDC B
Weight
0.50

Abstract

India’s acceleration of ethanol blending, advancing a 20 percent ethanol blend (E20) target from 2030 to 2025, has been cast as a twin strategy of energy security and rapid decarbonisation. The Roadmap for Ethanol Blending in India (NITI Aayog-Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, 2021), procurement reforms, the Pradhan Mantri JI-VAN Jaiv Indhan-Vatavaran Anukool Fasal Awashesh Nivaran) Yojana for advanced biofuels, and India’s role in the Global Biofuels Alliance (GBA) together make ethanol a domestic policy instrument and an instrument of climate diplomacy. This commentary makes three claims. First, the E20 acceleration is political as much as technical. It reorganises supply chains, territorial control and state-market relations. Second, because ethanol is agro-ecologically embedded, rapid expansion reconfigures land and water regimes in ways that reproduce familiar patterns of enclosure (the conversion of common or smallholder land into concentrated industrial control), adverse incorporation and uneven development identified in global agrofuel literatures. Third, the promise of second-generation (2G) and advanced biofuels functions as a legitimating horizon—a projected future of cleaner technology that authorises rapid expansion of first-generation production in the present, often without adequate ecological or social safeguards. Drawing on policy documents, and government reports, this piece diagnoses central governance failures and proposes pragmatic remedies in the form of phased rollouts, mandatory lifecycle accounting (including water and indirect land-use change), shared liability for retrofits, explicit agrarian safeguards, and calibrated public finance for advanced biofuels, so that speed does not become a cover for unequal ecological ordering. (NITI Aayog 2021; GBA 2024-25; NBCC 2021)

Open via your library →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.71279/epw.v61i5.46613

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{rohith2026,
  title        = {{Leading by Blending: The Political Ecology of Rapid Transition}},
  author       = {Rohith Jyothish},
  journal      = {Economic and Political Weekly},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.71279/epw.v61i5.46613},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

Leading by Blending: The Political Ecology of Rapid Transition

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.