{"id":23318,"date":"2020-06-16T04:18:06","date_gmt":"2020-06-16T04:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/?p=23318"},"modified":"2020-06-16T04:18:11","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T04:18:11","slug":"on-april-20-2020-the-national-biofuel-coordination-committee-nbcc-meeting-under-the-chairmanship-of-dharmendra-pradhan-minister-of-petroleum-natural-gas-has-approved-allowed-food-corporation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/on-april-20-2020-the-national-biofuel-coordination-committee-nbcc-meeting-under-the-chairmanship-of-dharmendra-pradhan-minister-of-petroleum-natural-gas-has-approved-allowed-food-corporation\/","title":{"rendered":"FCI allowed to convert surplus rice to ethanol: Government"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>On April 20, 2020 The National Biofuel Coordination Committee <strong>(NBCC)<\/strong> meeting under the chairmanship of&nbsp; Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of Petroleum &amp; Natural Gas has approved &amp; allowed&nbsp; Food Corporation of India <strong>(FCI)<\/strong> to convert the <strong>available surplus rice to ethanol<\/strong> so as to utilize it in making alcohol-based hand-sanitizers &amp; also&nbsp; for the&nbsp; Ethanol Blended Petrol (EBP) programme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Recently the government has also allowed <strong>sugar companies<\/strong> and distilleries to make hand sanitizers using ethanol. The sugar companies supply ethanol to oil marketing companies for blending with petrol.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><u>Policy<\/u><\/strong><br>It is approved in reference to the National Policy on Biofuels (2018) under Para 5.3 envisages that during an agriculture crop year when there is oversupply of food grains as&nbsp; anticipated by the Ministry of Agriculture &amp; Farmers Welfare, the policy will allow conversion of these surplus quantities of food grains to ethanol, based on the approval of NBCC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><u>Key Points<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>i.<\/strong>The government, as of March 10, has a total of 58.49 million tonne (mt) of food grains which consist of 30.97 mt of rice &amp; 27.52 mt of wheat in the FCI godowns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>ii.<\/strong>Currently it has huge rice stock from previous years &amp; does not include the 19.23 mt of unmilled paddy lying with millers on behalf of FCI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>iii.<\/strong>The food grains stock is higher than the required norm of maintaining a reserve of about 21 million tonnes as on April 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>iv.<\/strong>Under the <strong>National Food Security Act <\/strong>(NFSA),2013 .the government is supplying 5 kg of food grains &amp; 1 kg of wheat per month(for 3 months) to over 80 crore people at a highly subsidised price of Rs 2-3 per kg on March 26 as a relief to poor people during the ongoing lockdown period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>v.<\/strong>The 5 kg grains are over and above the regular Public Distribution System(PDS) allotment &amp;&nbsp; estimates, to absorb close to 11 mt more rice from the Centre\u2019s pool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>vi.<\/strong>By using the surplus rice for ethanol, it will address about 750 million litres from the total capacity of 2 billion litres of grain-based distillery capacities lying idle, due to lack of feed stock, to some extent &amp;&nbsp; will absorb some of the surplus rice lying with the FCI, which is estimated to be several times the required quantity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><u>About FCI:<\/u><\/strong><br><strong>Headquarters<\/strong>\u2013 New Delhi, India<br><strong>Chairman &amp; Managing Director (MD)<\/strong>\u2013 D.V. Prasad, Indian Administrative Service (IAS)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On April 20, 2020 The National Biofuel Coordination Committee (NBCC) meeting under the chairmanship of&nbsp; Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of Petroleum &amp; Natural Gas has approved &amp; allowed&nbsp; Food Corporation of India (FCI) to convert the available surplus rice to ethanol so as to utilize it in making alcohol-based hand-sanitizers &amp; also&nbsp; for the&nbsp; Ethanol Blended [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1012],"tags":[1135],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-23318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-affairs-april-2020","tag-nbcc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23318"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23320,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23318\/revisions\/23320"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23318"},{"taxonomy":"offerexpiration","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/offerexpiration?post=23318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}