Consumers asked to surrender additional cylinders by Oct 31

Consumers asked to surrender additional cylinders by Oct 31

NEW DELHI, OCT 2: 

Owning multiple cooking gas connections could land you in trouble.

In a bid to rationalise usage of domestic LPG, the public sector oil companies are putting out a list of consumers who have multiple connections on their Web sites.

An oil company source said that those consumers will be asked to surrender all connections and retain only one double cylinder connection per household. “If they don’t comply with it by October 31, then all their connections will be blocked,” the official said.

Asked what will be the percentage of such connections, sources said it would be almost 10-15 per cent out of the 14 crore cooking gas connections in the country.

The Petroleum Ministry had recently issued a statement saying that, “To ensure that subsidised domestic cylinders are available to genuine customers, new connection requests will be accepted by all LPG distributors.”

But, connections will be released on completion of KYC (Know Your Customer) formalities and de-duplication of the applicant across all the three oil companies to ensure that multiple connections are not released, the Ministry had said.

Today, the companies, through their distributors network, deliver over 100 crore cylinders annually. After the Government decided to restrict the availability of subsidised domestic cylinders (14.2 kg) to six annually, the country has four prices for LPG – non-subsidised (14.2 kg), subsidised (14.2 kg), exemption category (14.2 kg) and commercial (19 kg).

In October, while the subsidised domestic gas is available at Rs 399/cylinder in Delhi, the non-subsidised domestic gas is priced at Rs 883.5/cylinder and the same for exempted category – charitable institutions – was at Rs 1,062/cylinder. The rate of commercial LPG (19 kg) is Rs 1,536.50/cylinder. These rates will be reviewed on a monthly basis and will vary from one city to another. Concerns were raised by the All-India LPG Distributors’ Federation that the OMCs and the Government would have to come up with a proper enforcement mechanism for smooth implementation of the capping decision. The oil companies developed a special software to help distributors in proper billing.

“Using this opportunity of upgrading the portal, the oil companies also decided to weed out those having multiple connections,” sources added.