Willow

Software Engineer | Culer |
Learning to be a youtuber 👇🏼

[Willow @barca_coded]

His only ever L has been wearing a Madrid jersey

[Cockroach is Back @Cockroachisback]

“We are satyagrahis who follow Gandhi-Ambedkar, we are not scared of their attacks. It has come to my knowledge the attackers belonged to RSS. Whenever anyone raises their voice against this govt or their ideology, they launch such attacks,” CJP founder @abhijeet_dipke in Nagpur

[Ankur @AnkurMessi_]

Single-handedly carried this shitty Spain team

[total Barça @totalBarca]

You’ll never guess who was criticized for having a bad match today.

[Willow @barca_coded]

@UTDFondree What retard watches this and decides to slander him?? 😂

[Willow @barca_coded]

@NalinisKitchen Tell specifics. Otherwise don't spread bogus claims

[Willow @barca_coded]

Being lactose intolerant is such a cheat code for weight loss

[Willow @barca_coded]

@deepakraghav012 @abhijeet_dipke @MadhukarS1988 Just shows how spineless you people are

[Shashank Mattoo @MattooShashank]

Flashback to the time India removed security barricades from the US Embassy to send a message after America strip-searched an Indian diplomat

[Hariprasad🇵🇹🇫🇷 @HariPrasat53548]

Accept the fact that cricket is irrelevant outside india

[Pain.𝕏 @GBarca_]

€120m on left backs in the last two years all just to stop our starboy 😭❤️

[Chinmayi Sripaada @Chinmayi]

Unbelievable. Someone who imported and donated oxygen concentrators is now being charged 14 Lakh customs duty 5 years later.

What a horrendous, horrendous system that punishes every good deed.

[Bharath. @GodofBadPuns]

If Kerala really wants to be a beacon of scientific temper, then it needs to first completely cut off any ties with Homeopathy and Ayurveda (at least to an extent). But neither UDF nor LDF has the guts to do that.

[Jyoti @virgojyoti02]

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.

[Willow @barca_coded]

@Mor3mor3mor @keylimepie2000 I am not the one crying about some random shop in Bangalore

[Willow @barca_coded]

@xtweets18 Nice one, you almost had me raging

[Willow @barca_coded]

@SnrJusto We didn't do anything 😂 Lamine is just on a different level

[Willow @barca_coded]

@zackdfilms1 Confirmation bias?

[Willow @barca_coded]

@vijucharlie Where tf were you when GOAT released? 😂