An El Niño this year may not be a bad thing for sugar mills, particularly in eastern Uttar Pradesh. “We have been having too much rain in September-October during the last two years. Late monsoon rain, along with water released from Nepal into our rivers, have been causing flooding of fields and affecting cane yields here. If El Niño results in the monsoon not being prolonged, it wouldn't be bad at least for our mills,” said Avantika Saraogi, Promoter and Business Lead-New Initiatives of Balrampur Chini Mills Ltd (BCML). With 10 mills, all in eastern UP, that can together crush 80,000 tonnes of cane daily and five distilleries with combined alcohol production capacity of 1,050 kilo-litres per day (KLPD), the Rs 4,728.65-crore turnover BCML is India's largest integrated sugar-cum-ethanol producer. The company achieved its peak cane crushing of 105.37 lakh tonnes (lt) in the 2019-20 sugar year (October-September). That fell to 87.52 lt in 2020-21, before recovering somewhat to 88.83 lt and 103.01 lt in following two years. It mirrored the overall trend in UP, where mills crushed 1,118.02 lt in 2019-20, 1,027.50 lt in 2020-21, 1,016.26 lt in 2021-22 and 1,098.82 lt in 2022-23. BCML is hoping to crush an all-time-high 115 lt of cane in the coming sugar year from October 2023. The company also expects the share of ethanol in its total revenues to increase from 21 per cent in 2022-23 to about 35 per cent in the current fiscal (April-March). “In the last five year, we have expanded our distillery capacity from 520 KLPD to 1,050 KLPD. Our alcohol sales have gone up from 11.93 crore litres in 2019-20 to 19.79 crore in 2022-23, which included 17.09 crore litres of ethanol supplied to oil marketing companies. In 2023-24, we look to do 32 crore litres, consolidating our position as the country's largest ethanol producer,” Saraogi told The Indian Express. BCML, in November last year, commissioned a 320 KLPD distillery at Maizapur in Gonda district that previously housed a 3,000 tonnes cane per day sugar mill. While the mill's capacity has been expanded to 4,000 tonnes, the entire juice from the cane crushed is going towards production of ethanol. “It is Asia's first sugar mill that did not produce a single bag of sugar in the 2022-23 season. The distillery operated on sugarcane syrup (clarified and concentrated juice) during the crushing season from November to March and grain (surplus rice from Food Corporation of India and broken rice from open market) in the off-season. In this way, we have been able to operate for around 330 days of the year,” Saraogi added.
