BHUBANESWAR: As the country is facing acute shortage of hand sanitisers, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has decided to use surplus rice in Central godowns for production of ethanol to make alcohol-based sanitisers. The decision was taken at a meeting of National Biofuel Coordination Committee (NBCC) chaired by Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
“It was approved that the surplus rice available with Food Corporation of India (FCI) may be converted to ethanol for utiliasation in making alcohol-based hand-sanitisers and in blending for ethanol blended petrol (EBP) programme,” Pradhan said.
He said the National Policy on Biofuels, 2018 envisages that during an agriculture crop year when there is projected over supply of food grains as anticipated by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, the policy will allow conversion of these surplus quantities of food grains to ethanol, based on the approval of NBCC. The national policy allows production of ethanol from damaged food grains like wheat and broken rice which are unfit for human consumption.