Every litre has been 20 per cent ethanol since April. The court declined to order a choice. Your warranty is safe. Straight answers are harder to come by.
Here is something you can no longer do at an Indian petrol pump: buy petrol. Plain petrol, the stuff every carburetted motorcycle in this country was designed around. Since April, every litre sold has been twenty per cent ethanol by law, and the lower blends are not stocked any more. Not rationed. Not restricted. Gone. And at no point did anybody ask the man with the fifteen-year-old bike whether he minded.
Hear me out before you scream back, because this is not the column you think it is.
I am not going to tell you E20 is eating your engine. The government says it isn’t, it has published its testing, and I have read a lot of worried owners this month without finding one who lost a part to it. What they report is duller and more believable: harder kicks from cold on old singles, a softer response at part throttle, and worse mileage. Annoying. Not catastrophic.
What was taken was not your engine. It was your choice, and then your straight answer.
The choice went first. When a petition reached the Supreme Court asking that ethanol-free petrol stay available and that pumps be labelled so buyers knew what they were getting, the court declined to entertain it. So the answer to “which petrol should I use” is now, for almost everybody, whichever one comes out of the nozzle. The only reported exception is 100-octane, XP100 and Power100, which is dear and thin on the ground.
Then the answers started disagreeing with each other. In August 2025 the petroleum ministry said that in older vehicles “some rubber parts and gaskets may require replacement earlier than in case non blended fuel was used”. Eleven months later the same ministry said claims that “rubber hoses will fail, engines will seize, fuel tanks will corrode” do not stand the test of scientific evidence. Both of those are the government. Pick one.
On mileage it is the same story. The ministry allows a three to five per cent drop. Testing reported by Autocar India puts it between 5.2 and 12.4 per cent on older vehicles, and mind you that is car data, because nobody has published a two-wheeler figure at all. Which is its own answer, no?
Meanwhile, in February, Royal Enfield began selling an E20 kit for carburetted BS3 and BS4 350 UCE bikes. Fuel lines, seals, gaskets, O-rings. About Rs 1,700. Now, I am not accusing anybody of anything. But if the rubber is fine, what exactly am I buying? And my own Classic 500 is not on the list, and neither is any fuel-injected bike, so the owners most likely to be worried have nothing to buy at all.
Give the state its due, because it has a real case. Crude imports are a very, very real national problem. Every new two-wheeler sold here is E20-compatible. Maruti serviced 2.84 crore vehicles last financial year, 1.5 crore of them never certified for E20, and reported no corrosion. And every manufacturer is honouring warranty on old bikes and new. That matters more than the internet thinks. Nobody will refuse your claim over a tankful.
So I am not asking for my old petrol back. That argument is finished and I lost it, along with everyone else.
I am asking for a sticker on the dispenser telling me what is in it. That is the whole ask. If the fuel is as harmless as the ministry says, the sticker costs nothing and settles it.
Tell me what is in the tank. I will decide how to feel about it.
