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New Delhi: Every day, millions of Indians turn a key, press a starter and expect their vehicles to do one simple thing: move.

For many owners of older vehicles that expectation has quietly become uncertain. Motorcycles refuse to start on cold mornings, cars are losing power without warning while the fuel economy shrinks.

Sunil Kumar stands outside D.P. Motors, a Royal Enfield authorised service centre in Zamrudpur Village, New Delhi, where he says he has seen a rise in fuel-related vehicle complaints following the rollout of E20 petrol. Photo: Saloni Sharma.

Mechanics report clogged injectors, corroded fuel lines and cracked rubber components with a frequency they say had never seen before. These failures rarely make headlines. They arrive one vehicle at a time and become patterns in workshops scattered across the country.

At D.P. Motors, a Royal Enfield authorised service centre tucked inside Delhi’s Zamrudpur village, Sunil Kumar, a mechanic, says the pattern became impossible to ignore soon after E20 petrol was rolled out nationwide in April 2025. Customers began arriving with rough idling, hard starts, engine misfires in motorcycles barely three or four years old.

Mechanic Sunil Kumar displays fuel drained from a customer’s motorcycle at his workshop in Zamrudpur Village, New Delhi. Photo: Saloni Sharma.

One afternoon, he drained the fuel tank of a customer’s motorcycle into a plastic bottle. The fuel separated almost immediately. A pale layer of petrol floated above water and a dark black residue had settled at the bottom. Holding up the bottle to the light, Kumar pointed to the sludge.

“This is what’s going into the engine,” he said. “When the vehicle breaks down, customers blame the mechanic. But the problem isn’t our work. It’s the fuel.”

That bottle tells a story that India’s ethanol transition often does not. On paper, the country’s ethanol blending programme has been one of its most ambitious reforms. By increasing the proportion of domestically produced ethanol in petrol, the government hopes to reduce the crude oil imports, lower carbon emissions and support the sugarcane farmers.

E20 (petrol blended with 20% ethanol) was projected as a crucial milestone in that journey. Barely a year after completing its nationwide rollout, the government has shifted its attention to the next destination.

In June 2026, Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri launched E85 fuel at an Indian Oil retail outlet in New Delhi. The rollout commences across 48 Public Sector Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) retail outlets (ROs) in the country, enabling flex-fuel vehicle users to access this cleaner fuel. The initiative is slated for nationwide expansion.

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