As already noted , in India, the three principal sugar products are plantation white sugar, khandsari and gur. Gur is not a close substitute for sugar, and is mainly consumed by low income rural people as a food stuff rather than as a sweetening agent. Khandsari, however, is a close substitute. It can contain high proportions of fine crystals and is sometimes difficult to distinguish from plantation white sugar. The technologies used to produce these three products are briefly described below.

- Plantation white sugar is produced by the vacuum pan sulphitation (VPS) method in large scale manufacturing processes. The cane juice in sugar factories is clarified by a chemical process--lime sulphitation or lime carbonation. The vacuum pan method is used for evaporation of juice to get massecuite. This does not require a high boiling temperature for evaporation. Power driven closed crystallizers (vessels) are then used to form sugar crystals. The molasses is removed from fully automated centrifuges of large capacity. Sugar is dried mechanically and transferred to gunny bags directly.

- Khandsari sugar is finely granulated, crystallized sugar produced by the open pan method. Khandsari units are generally much smaller than modem sugar mills and are not subject to the extremely detailed regulatory controls which are applied to sugar mills ( see later discussion).In traditional processes, vegetable clarification agents are used and the molasses is separated from the sugar crystals by hand-driven centrifuges. In the modem processes, the open sulphitation (OPS) method is used for clarification and power-driven centrifuges are used to separate the molasses from the sugar crystals.

- Gur is solidified clarified cane juice produced in small scale operations. Vegetable agents are used to clarify the cane juice. The juice is boiled and evaporated in open pans. The massecuite is removed from the pan when it reaches a critical temperature of about _115_<sup>0</sup> C, and cooled into solid substances by continuous stirring. One principal difference between white sugar /khandsari and gur is that molasses does not appear as a by-product when gur is made. As noted previously, gur is a non-centrifugal sugar since it does not use centrifuges to separate the sugar crystals.

# **INDIA** AND **THE WORLD MARKET**

# **_World production and consumption_**

Brazil is the largest sugar cane producer in the world , but most of its cane is used exclusively to produce ethanol. Excluding this Brazilian cane from world production statistics (as does FAO- see Data S.3)- India is by far the largest producer, accounting for about 22 percent of world production. Since 1964 world cane production used for sugar has grown at an average rate of about 1.28 percent a year, and Indian cane production has grown at approximately the same rate. However average Indian per hectare yields have increased faster than world average yields, and in the early 1990s were 5 to 10 percent above world average yields, whereas they were 10 to 15 percent lower in the 1960s. Consequently the Indian share of total world sugarcane production did not change despite a decline from about one quarter to about one fifth of the total world area planted to cane used for sugar cane production.

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