The recent increase in petrol prices has expectedly created a raging storm. Hence, our focus in this piece is to debunk the long-standing myth of revenue forgone in successive Union Budgets. Alternatively, it has now become fashionable to argue that the central government regularly forgoes huge amount of revenues (read: to the industry) and, hence, there is no harm in continuing with demerit subsidies. Unfortunately, the argument has been made by Prof Amartya Sen, who was clearly misled by some of his associations.