India’s biggest experiment isn’t happening in a laboratory. It’s happening at fuel pumps, with 1.4 billion people as the sample. Welcome to the world’s biggest fuel trial, where every Indian motorist is unwillingly, a participant.
Move over cinema and cricket, a pan-India experiment is uniting Indians. Decades after the Father of the Nation experimented with truth, the truth that Indians were faced with on Tuesday was that they were all part of a grand experiment — of 20% ethanol blending in petrol. An experiment that is live even as we speak, and whose result will only be out next year. And the biggest truth — no one signed the consent form.
Bag the cat, this is the Schrodinger’s Sample. It exists and it doesn’t. There no sample because the entire country of 1.4 billion is the sample.
“The government is trying to experiment with 20% ethanol blending. We will have results of that by next year,” Attorney General R Venkataramani told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The Guinness World Records should take note. India is conducting the world’s biggest experiment. A country obsessed with record-creation shouldn’t lose the chance to highlight that.
And if you thought it was just about the sample, no one’s told you that India isn’t for beginners. Well, it is for bygoners. Let the bygones be baigans. For it is the fruit of a foregone conclusion.
The “20% mix of ethanol is a policy decision that is not likely to change,” AG Venkataramani told India Today TV shortly after the Supreme Court hearing.
In science laboratories across the world, students are taught a set format to document an experiment. Introduction, methods/procedure, results and conclusion.
In India, the government be like: My lab, my rules. The government has written the conclusion even before arriving with the results.
Now, what’s the harm in making the entire country the sample for an experiment? Haven’t we been experimenting with one party after another? If we can risk an entire democracy with our experiments, why can’t the democratically elected subject us and our vehicles to some ethanol-petrol blending experiments?
And our politicians are just following in the footsteps of the Big Pharma, which had for decades treated Indians as guinea pigs for untested drugs and undeclared clinical trials. Even then, the poor Indians didn’t know that they were part of some medical experiment. It is the very same now. Ignorance is bliss.
The leaders might have made a safe assumption. Indians are habitual guinea pigs. Make them queue up and their generational memory kicks in, and they fall in line. Test their patience with question paper leaks, and they won’t care because they are so used to everything leaking — from roofs to the sarkari system.
For millions of Indians, their bikes are the means to earning their daily bread. For millions of bread-winners, their small car is a way of keeping themselves safe from being crushed on the road even as the system crushes them, systematically. Each of them saved over years to buy the vehicle. It’s not a luxury, but a survival kit. Now, the government is experimenting with them and their survival kits.
As of 2024, there were 2.3 crore vehicles incompatible with flex fuels that were being force-fed E20 petrol, according to Context, the journalism platform of Thomson Reuters Foundation. Even printer companies advise the use of compatible ink, and we are talking about a complex motor engine here.
People aren’t opposing the fuel-blending policy, but its implementation. The E20 mandate leaves most buyers without choice of fuel that’s suitable for their cars and bikes. Where is the E10, E5 or normal petrol they are asking? But who’s listening?
The government also knows that unlike the farmers, these guinea pigs won’t have the time to protest at Jantar Mantar. They are too busy working to feed their families with the leftovers after the taxes are paid. They will helplessly see 20% ethanol-blended petrol go down the tanks of their vehicles incompatible with flex fuel. They fill it, shut it, but can’t forget it.
Gandhi, the original experimenter with truth, has a Jayanti. A Jayanthi in the environment department had a tax that had to do with what Munnabhai fought against with Gandhigiri. Now, the entire country is being taxed in the name of environment and a reduced fuel import bill. You signed up for this the moment you were born in the land of the Gandhi, and no document, including the passport, is needed to prove that.
The government doesn’t need to make the roads safer and it doesn’t need to provide efficient public transport systems. The government has succeeded in its mission by uniting an entire country by turning it into one big sample for an experiment.
The experiment’s results are expected next year, but the government has already decided to implement 20% ethanol blending, irrespective of the findings.
The fuel might be blended, the sorrow is pure. So, the next time someone asks you to smile, try saying E for ethanol.
Authored by Nilesh Lodha — Goldmedia.in | Bold Truths. No PR. Just Perspective
(All ideation, concept, headlines, sub-headings, Punchlines and section-wise structuring by the author; editorial refinement and language styling by the Goldmedia.in Editorial Team.)
