Sugarcane (Control) Order

Imagine a law written in 1966 to regulate an industry that, at the time, made essentially one product, sugar, and had never heard of using sugarcane to make automotive fuel. The Sugarcane (Control) Order, 1966, is exactly that law, it has governed how mills are licensed, how cane pricing and payment discipline work, and what counts as a sugar factory's regulated activity for nearly six decades, largely unchanged even as the industry itself transformed dramatically underneath it.

That transformation is precisely why the government drafted a sweeping Sugarcane (Control) Order, 2026, released for public comment through May 20, 2026, the most significant change is explicitly integrating ethanol into the regulatory definition of what a sugar factory even is, expanding the old sugar-only framework to formally cover ethanol production from cane juice, syrup and molasses, with a concrete conversion formula, 600 litres of ethanol counted as equivalent to one tonne of sugar for production accounting.

The draft also modernises factory oversight considerably, introducing formal approval processes for new factories, minimum distance rules between competing mills, higher performance bank guarantees, and digital compliance through assigned plant codes and API-based reporting, replacing decades of largely manual, paper-based regulatory administration.

This rewrite matters well beyond legal housekeeping, it's the government formally acknowledging that Indian sugar mills are no longer purely sugar producers, they're increasingly integrated ethanol and power businesses, and the regulatory framework finally catching up to that reality is exactly what will determine how smoothly the industry's continued shift toward ethanol, covered elsewhere on this site, actually plays out.