You know something is seriously wrong, when the BJP led State Govt orders an inquiry into one of its pet projects thrust on Punekars against their will, a project led by their pet consultant Bimal Patel.
1. Fundamentally flawed hydraulic report
2. Multiple violations of WRD circulars
3. Violation of Environment Clearance conditions
All these violations have increased the flood risk for Pune - sadly, the NGT while acknowledging the above concerns as valid and ordering repeated clarifications and investigations, has not stayed the project till the concerns are addressed.
Hopefully this intervention by the Min of Environment, MH will instill some sense into PMC and the political backers of #RFDPune
Thank you @AUThackeray and @SVYadwadkar 🙏
https://t.co/XDrhnTgm9e
E100 is a bad idea. Not because ethanol is bad. But because this is not how you do it.
Brazil is the only country in the world that has made ethanol fuel actually work at scale.
They started in 1975. It took them thirty years. And the order in which they did it matters. First they built the cars. Millions of them, flex-fuel vehicles that could handle ethanol. The fuel infrastructure came after, once the demand was already sitting in driveways across São Paulo and Rio. By the time Brazilians were filling up on pure ethanol, they had spent decades building the engine technology, the pump network, the supply chain, and the price stability to make it viable. Even then it had rough patches.
India has done it the other way around.
We announced the fuel before the cars exist. The flex-fuel fleet right now is one Wagon R and some Hero bikes. That is not a fleet.
That is a pilot project dressed up as a policy.
This is not just it, other issue are:
Ethanol in India comes mostly from sugarcane. And sugarcane is one of the thirstiest crops we grow. It needs four to five times more water than most other crops. In Maharashtra, which is our biggest sugarcane state, that has always been a tension that everyone quietly lives with.
Now go to Vidarbha. This is the eastern part of Maharashtra. Cotton country. Drought country. The region where farmer suicides made headlines for years because the rains failed and the debt did not. Water here is not a policy question. It is a survival question. A farmer in Yavatmal or Wardha will tell you that a bad monsoon does not mean a bad harvest. It means a bad year for everything.
Sugarcane is already creeping into this region because the ethanol push has made it more profitable than cotton. And if E100 scales the way the government wants it to, that pressure gets stronger. More farmers in water-scarce land will shift to a crop that drinks water like it is free. The ones who can afford a borewell will go deeper. The ones who cannot will watch their neighbours do it and worry.
Nobody in the E100 announcement talked about this.
The government will say farmers should be free to grow what is profitable. That is fair. But policy that makes one choice significantly more profitable than another is not neutral. It is a nudge. And nudging water-stressed farmers in Vidarbha toward sugarcane is a nudge with consequences that will show up not in a press conference but in a groundwater report five years from now.
Then there is the trust problem sitting on top of all of this. Last April, E20 replaced regular petrol at 90,000 pumps without much warning. Mileage dropped. Repairs came up. A man in Chennai spent close to ₹4 lakh on fuel-related damage. The government's response was essentially that people were spreading misinformation. That is not how you bring people along.
So now E100 arrives and people are not starting from neutral. They are starting from angry.
Here is what would have actually made sense.
Pick three or four cities. Pune, Lucknow, Coimbatore, one more. Build a proper E100 pilot there. Put the pumps in. Work with one or two carmakers to get a few thousand flex-fuel vehicles on the road in those cities. Run it for two years. Measure the mileage honestly. Publish the cost per kilometre in plain numbers. Let a family in Pune tell their cousin in Nagpur that their monthly fuel bill actually went down. That cousin will want in.
That is how Brazil did it. That is how you build a market.
Instead we have a national announcement, a handful of cars, almost no pumps, unresolved water questions, unhappy farmers in the wrong regions growing the wrong crop for the wrong reasons, and a public that has already been burned once and is not in a mood to be told to trust the process again.
E100 could have been a good story. Grow your own fuel, keep the money at home, give farmers a second income, reduce the import bill. All of that is real and worth doing.
But a good idea launched badly does not stay a good idea for long.
It just becomes the next thing people are angry about.
@PMCPune is Hell-bent on WASTING citizens' money for building #BBPP road on #VetalTekdi (in addition to many city-wide projects) that will DESTROY #Pune, & are only being pushed for the Profits of the builder lobby - in addition to lining civic officials' & politicians' pockets!
@PMCPune needs more educated people on board because they have misinterpreted the SC order. When Hon. SC writes that SEIAA must decide expeditiously on the EC application once it is received by them that doesn’t imply that PMC must expedite the EIA process!!
The entire tendering exercise has been tushed with since Nov 2025 leading to a single bidder who gave a budget of 35lakhs in Jan 2026. And now the Standing Committee of PMC has approved the budget for this at almost 80% escalation in just three months?!!! A whooping 1.51crores for a 2.1km partially elevated road project?? Why?? @shrinathbhimale@CMOMaharashtra@MDNagpure@navalMH@AntiCorruptIND
On my complaint, State Gov of Maharashtra directs
1. Commissioner PMC
2. Chief Engineer Water Resources
3. Regional Officer MPCB
to conduct urgent inquiry/inspection of ongoing RFD project with participation of complainant & submit the report immediately.
PMC is silent on this.
@raghav_chadha Joining the ANTI-National, अधर्मी, FASCIST @BJP4India, the "अनपढ़ गुंडों की पार्टी" (in YOUR OWN words), was the BEST choice in front of you??
Shame shame!!! 🤣🤣🤣
This tweet is not just wrong, it is unlettered. It is a false equivalence so fundamental it collapses under the weight of a single question: who was the state with?
At Shaheen Bagh, the state was against the protesters. Police were deployed to contain them. The government called them anti-national. They blocked a road because they had no other instrument of pressure. The road was their only leverage.
At the farmer protests, the state drove trucks into them.
At the Mumbai rally, the state escorted them. Police cleared the path. Ministers attended. Government machinery facilitated the whole event.
This is not the same category of thing. One is dissent. The other is a power parade dressed up as dissent.
"Protest" is a word with a specific political grammar. It means people exercising pressure against power.
When power (BJP) itself organizes the event, or actively enables it, the word stops meaning anything.
You cannot protest on behalf of those who are already governing you. You can only perform for them.
What the tweet calls consistency is actually erasure. It erases the most important fact in any political event: where the state stands. And it does so in a way that serves exactly one purpose, to legitimize state-backed shows of strength by making them look like people's power.
They are not people's power. They are state power, pure and unadulterated.
There's a quiet trick in how we're taught to look at landscapes.
Green = beautiful. Brown = harsh. Forested = precious. Open = empty. It feels like common sense. It isn't. The Tibetan Plateau, Ladakh, the Gobi, the Deccan grasslands — none of these are failed versions of somewhere greener. They're full ecosystems with endemic species, ancient pastoralist cultures, and ecological roles nothing else can play. Grasslands store carbon underground. Rocky hills recharge our aquifers. Riverbeds breathe with the monsoon.
But once you've trained people to see "harsh" or "barren," the rest is easy.
Vetal Tekdi? "Barren hill, why not a tunnel through it." 🚧
The Mula-Mutha bed? "Wasteland, perfect for a riverfront promenade." 🏗️
Mature trees on a road-widening route? "Old, dying anyway." 🪓
An urban forest patch? "Underutilised land, ripe for development." 🏢
Notice the pattern. The land is always failing at something — failing to be green enough, neat enough, profitable enough. And the cure is always concrete.
The first act of destruction is a vocabulary. The second is a JCB.
🚨 SHOCKING: INDIA’S ARMY BEING PRIVATIZED? ADANI’S OWN “SAINIK SCHOOL” IS HERE — NEXT STOP, ADANI ARMED FORCES?
The picture you just saw isn’t a joke.
“Adani Sainik School” in Krishnapatnam, Nellore is REAL — and it’s one of the new Sainik Schools handed over under the Modi government’s PPP model.
While the Agniveer scheme trained our youth with public tax money for just 4 years… corporate giants like Adani now get ready-made, disciplined, battle-ready talent at throwaway prices for their “security” needs.
This isn’t education. This is the blueprint for a private army.
When public anger boils over the loot of national wealth, who will protect the corporates?
Their own trained Sainik cadets?
62% of the new Sainik Schools have already gone to RSS affiliates, BJP leaders, and their friends — including Adani. No minority institutions. Zero transparency. Just crony control over the pipeline that feeds our armed forces.
Is this democracy… or a full-blown conspiracy to turn India into a corporate fiefdom where the country’s army eventually answers to boardrooms instead of the Constitution?
Wake up, Bharat. Our jawans bleed for the nation — not for Adani-Ambanis.
Share if you still believe the Indian Army belongs to 140 crore Indians… not to a handful of billionaires.
#AdaniSainikSchool #AgniveerExposed #CorporateArmy #SaveSainikSchools #IndiaUnderCorporateRule