The bitter truth: Sugar price go through the roof

An unprecedented jump in retail prices of sugar is a reminder of how Govt inaction can quickly turn a price rise of an essential kitchen item into a national concern

Sugar is not a luxury. It sweetens the morning chai at a highway dhaba and the payasam at a wedding feast alike. So when the price of this democratic commodity jumps nearly 40 per cent in a month — from Rs 45-48 a kilogram in mid-July to Rs 65 by late August, UP’s ex-factory rate crossing a record Rs 5,400 a quintal — it isn’t a market footnote but a kitchen-table crisis.

The Centre ordered physical verification of stocks at every mill on July 24, completed it by August 14, then sat on the numbers as retail prices kept climbing. Only around August 22 — a month into the spike — did the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution finally speak at length, its first instinct defensive: batting down the theory gaining ground on social media and in Parliament that ethanol blending was the culprit. That defensiveness is telling, because ethanol had become the easy villain. India hit its 20 per cent ethanol-blending target in petrol in 2025, five years ahead of the original 2030 deadline, so it is fair to ask whether diverting cane to fuel tanks has starved the sugar bowl. The government’s own numbers say otherwise: sugar diverted to ethanol has actually fallen, from about 12 per cent in 2022-23 to roughly 9 per cent now, since nearly three-quarters of India’s ethanol comes from grain, chiefly maize, not cane. Ethanol blending is a convenient scapegoat, not the real culprit.

The duller, more accurate story is disease and weather.

Red rot and top borer infestation, worsened by waterlogging from excess rain, have pushed the outlook for the season starting in October down to roughly 30.6 million tonnes from an initial 34.3 million tonnes. Closing stock for the current season is projected at barely 3 to 3.5 million tonnes — among the thinnest cushions in decades — just as festival demand from Ganesh Chaturthi through Diwali peaks. Add a genuine global squeeze — international prices up 16 per cent in under two months on a projected 3.3-million-tonne world deficit — and old-fashioned hoarding by traders betting on further gains, and the price chart largely explains itself. None of this excuses the silence. A government holding mill-level stock data by mid-August owed the public that information before prices peaked, not a rebuttal of internet theories after the fact.

Transparency is itself a price-stabilisation tool; delay only feeds speculation and hoarding. The fixes on the table — duty-free imports of 10 lakh tonnes, stock limits on dealers till November, an earlier crushing start from October 15 — are sound but reactive.

The lasting answer lies upstream: faster disease-resistant cane varieties, production tracking that reflects ground reality rather than advance estimates revised down all season, a buffer stock insulated from the export-then-import flip-flops of recent years, and a Centre willing to publish bad news as promptly as it publishes denials.

Prices should cool once fresh cane reaches the crusher in October. Public trust, dented by a month of silence, will take longer to mend.