Thinking global, living local

← All Articles (Index) Announced vs. Delivered: Three Indian State Industrial Policies, Checked Against the Numbers Every state industry department publishes a policy PDF full of targets. Far fewer publish what actually happened afterward. We went looking for the after-numbers on five candidate policies — and could only build a real, non-fabricated case for three of them. State industrial and sectoral policies in India follow a predictable script: a glossy notification with big round-number targets, a launch event, and — a few years later — silence, unless a minister needs a good headline. The gap between the target in the policy PDF and what a citizen, investor or auditor can actually verify on the ground is where most of the interesting information lives. This piece tries to close that gap for three state policies using government portals, state assembly and budget data, and independently reported figures — not press-release adjectives. We started with five candidates: Uttar...

← All Articles (Index) A Tax Play: Grow Ethanol SGST Revenue, Cut CNG VAT to Match Low-Tax States Filed under: policy proposals. Companion data pieces: Ethanol Blending, OMC Books: E20 Today vs. E30 and State-by-State: Who Actually Earns From Ethanol Blending . This piece is different from those two — it isn't measuring the current system, it's proposing a change to it. The problem this is answering The state-by-state companion piece to this one ran the numbers and found something uncomfortable: under India's current tax architecture, every state loses money on ethanol blending, at every blend level, and no realistic rate tweak inside the existing structure fixes it. The mechanism is simple. Petrol sits outside GST — states tax it directly under their own VAT laws, at rates from 13% to over 35% depending on the state. Ethanol, the fuel that displaces a slice of that petrol at the pump, sits inside GST, taxed at a flat 5% (2.5% CGST + 2.5% SGST). So every litre o...

← All Articles (Index) India · Ethanol Blending · State Finances · ₹ crore / year State by state: who actually earns from ethanol blending? Our earlier piece mapped what rising ethanol blends do to the oil-marketing companies’ books and the national exchequer. This one goes state by state — who produces the ethanol, who taxes it, and why one state’s fuel-tax math looks nothing like another’s as blending climbs from E10 to E20 to E25/E30. Scenarios ·  E10 · E20 · E25 · E30 36 states/UTs modelled · PPAC Ready Reckoner FY25–26 H1 Read this first. No state finance department, the GST Council, or CAG publishes a state-wise, blend-wise breakdown of SGST collected on ethanol versus VAT foregone on the petrol it displaces. Every number below the header cards is a model — built from public PPAC petrol-sales an...