During the #WorldBiofuelDay webinar organized by, India’s premier OMCs IOC, BPCL and HPCL along with the #MNRE (Ministry Of New & Renewable Energy of India), enterprising Entrepreneurs, Julesh of Ecogreen Fuels and Shiva Vig of Bio-D energy raised this very pertinent point about many traders selling spurious blends of petroleum fuels as Biodiesel.
Over the last few years, the government of India made a lot of positive policy changes supporting the biofuel sector, one of which is the opening up of trading and retailing of biodiesel. But a lot of unscrupulous traders in collusion with local authorities in the states misused these policy changes and supplied spurious fuels as biodiesel to large diesel consumers.
It was very heartening to see that immediately after listening about this from Julesh and Shiva on the #worldbiofuelday, the government cracked down on these unscrupulous traders across India and put them behind bars. But in TN, it is sad that the local authorities in the Food & Civil supplies department, who turned a blind eye towards the rampant trade of spurious fuels, used this crackdown to harass genuine Biodiesel traders and manufacturers and forced them to shut down. This is an explicit disconnect between policymakers and policy implementers.
#MNRE of the Indian government should ensure that the policy changes for biodiesel benefit the biodiesel sector and not unscrupulous fossil fuel traders, they should also ensure that the policy implementers in the local authorities are completely in sync with the vision of #MNRE. It is disturbing, if genuine biodiesel traders and manufacturers are harassed using a policy that is meant to benefit them, all this when some unscrupulous traders from Pune are using brochures and marketing illegal fossil fuel blends as imported diesel.
It is high time that the Indian government bans or restrict imports of all products in Chapter 27 and mandate complete traceability of all biodiesel traded and retailed in India.