Maharashtra regains the sugar crown but water, yield, and idle capacity raise bigger questions
Maharashtra reclaimed India’s top sugar-producing position in 2025-26, producing 99.20 lakh tonnes after crushing 1,044.21 lakh tonnes cane. However, sharp output volatility, water stress and limited micro-irrigation highlight structural risks. Experts advocate higher productivity through drip irrigation, resilient varieties and precision agronomy instead of acreage expansion.
Maharashtra has once again emerged as India’s largest sugar-producing state. During the 2025-26 season, the state crushed 1,044.21 lakh tonnes of sugarcane and produced 99.20 lakh tonnes of sugar, overtaking Uttar Pradesh (approximately 89 lakh tonnes) to reclaim the national lead. At first glance, this appears to be a triumphant story of post-drought agricultural recovery. Yet a closer examination of the past five seasons reveals an underlying structural vulnerability that celebratory headlines obscure. Maharashtra’s sugar output has experienced sharp, destabilising swings: from a record of 137.28 lakh tonnes in 2021-22 down to 80.76 lakh tonnes during the 2024-25 drought, before recovering to 99.20 lakh tonnes in 2025-26.
The fundamental issue confronting policymakers, factory federations, and farming communities is not simply how much sugar the state can extract when the southwest monsoon delivers ideal rains. The far more consequential question is how much cane Maharashtra can reliably yield year after year without depleting its deep aquifers, drying up irrigation dams, and overtaxing finite water resources. Across the state, installed sugar milling, ethanol distillation, and co-generation capacities have expanded far beyond what the surrounding agro-ecological system can consistently support.
The volatility in Maharashtra’s annual sugar output remains intimately tied to erratic monsoon patterns and precarious regional hydrology. Sugarcane now covers roughly 5–6 per cent of the state’s gross cropped area up from about 4% a decade ago yet it consumes an estimated 60–70 per cent of the water used for irrigation, according to successive CACP and ICRIER assessments. A significant share of the cane belt sits in drought-prone or water-stressed districts: Marathwada alone accounts for nearly a quarter of the state’s cane area, much of it in districts such as Latur and Dharashiv that have known repeated scarcity. Compounding this hydro-agricultural pressure, only about 35 per cent of the cane area operates under water-saving micro-irrigation systems such as drip, despite repeated state mandates. This combination creates acute systemic fragility.
Cascading impact
In a surplus-monsoon year, Maharashtra supports a massive crop, allowing factories to run prolonged, highly lucrative crushing cycles. But whenever rainfall falters, the impact cascades rapidly across the entire agricultural value chain. Deficient rainfall depresses farm yields, lowers sucrose recovery rates, curtails bagasse for power cogeneration, starves distilleries of B-heavy molasses and syrup, shortens the operational crushing window (mills ran barely 90 days in 2024-25, against a normal 130–150), and severely impairs the cash flows required for timely Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) payouts to growers. Maharashtra’s sugar economy has decisively transitioned from an industrial expansion challenge into a water-efficiency imperative.
This instability is underscored by 5-year operational benchmarks across the State. In the record-breaking 2021-22 season, average cane productivity reached roughly 90 tonnes per hectare by official agricultural estimates, allowing mills to crush 1,320.31 lakh tonnes of cane over an average of 173 crushing days and produce an unprecedented 137.28 lakh tonnes of sugar. In stark contrast, during the severe 2024-25 drought, average yields fell to about 78 tonnes per hectare, causing total cane crushed to drop to 852.34 lakh tonnes and sugar output to collapse to 80.76 lakh tonnes. The 2025-26 recovery to 99.20 lakh tonnes from 1,044.21 lakh tonnes crushed owes much to a roughly 20 per cent jump in cane acreage from 13.7 lakh hectares to 16.4 lakh hectares alongside a good monsoon, which is precisely the kind of horizontal expansion the state can ill afford. Actual cane availability also continues to fall short of industrial potential: operating the state’s 200-plus sugar mills, with their combined daily crushing capacity of about 9.5 lakh tonnes, across an optimal 160-day window would require roughly 1,520 lakh tonnes of sugarcane annually. Even the record 2021/22 season supplied barely 87 per cent of this requirement, while in the drought year of 2024-25 mills received only about 56 per cent.
Attempting to resolve these raw material deficits by clearing more land for sugarcane is physically untenable, as the state already confronts severe groundwater depletion and competing drinking water requirements. The only viable path forward is vertical intensification: extracting higher tonnage and sucrose recovery from every cultivated hectare through climate-resilient cultivars, precision agronomy, and modern soil-fertility management. The state does not need more crushing infrastructure or licensed distillation units; it urgently requires dependable cane productivity per drop of water.
Shifting strategic compass
A sustainable future requires shifting the sector’s strategic compass from geographic acreage expansion to resource-efficient agronomy. Official estimates already place the 2025/26 yield near 94 tonnes per hectare. The real challenge is sustaining an average of roughly 95 tonnes per hectare through the drought years as well as the bumper ones by 2027/28, underpinned by accelerated adoption of drip irrigation, rapid varietal renewal, and automated soil-moisture advisory networks. Holding that average would allow Maharashtra to reduce aggregate cane acreage by approximately 8%. This strategic consolidation would liberate roughly 1.3 lakh hectares of fertile, irrigated land for less thirsty oilseeds, pulses, or coarse cereals, while simultaneously conserving millions of cubic metres of water. The long-term survival of Maharashtra’s sugar and bioenergy economy will not depend on spreading thirsty cane stalks across ever-widening tracts of parched land, but on cultivating resilience and extracting maximum economic value from every drop of water invested in the soil.
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Source : The Hindu Businessline
