Other States - Orissa   

LPG distribution goes haywire in twin cities

BHUBANESWAR: For the past six months, Nalini Sahu, a homemaker in Capital City's Palasuni area, has been going through all kinds of harrowing experiences to get a cooking gas cylinder from her regular quota.

From the tedious process of booking LPG cylinder with distributing agency over phone to pleading the distributors personally for timely delivery of cooking gas cylinder, Ms. Sahu has been devoting substantial time to make sure that her family does not go hungry.

But hundreds of families in the city are not able to give the same effort as Ms. Sahu makes. LPG distribution system in Bhubaneswar has gone haywire leading to long wait for receiving cooking gas cylinders.

Although gas companies claim that there has been no problem in supply of cooking gas and the State government agencies maintain that they have been doing everything to prevent black-marketing, general consumers are subjected to undergo traumatic experiences of securing cooking gas cylinders.

“The distributor takes different pleas for not supplying the cylinder in time. We have to tolerate all his nonsense clarifications for the delay in supply,” Ms. Sahu said.

The only reply comes from distributors is that there has not been adequate supply of LPG cylinders. But this argument is struck down of oil companies.

“There is absolutely no short supply of cylinders in Orissa. Whatever requirement is being placed before us, we are in a position to meet those,” said V. Ramgopal, general manager of Indian Oil Corporation-Orissa and State-level coordinator for all PSU oil companies, said here on Monday.

Everyday nearly 10,000 cylinders for domestic purposes are being supplied to distributors in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. Monthly, it comes to around 3 lakh cylinders, which should be enough to ensure uninterrupted supply of cooking gas in the twin cities.

But large-scale diversion of cylinders for commercial use and creating artificial shortage to facilitate black-marketing made the matter worse.

“There could be two reasons behind disturbance in supply of cooking gas. Either a distributor is unable to pay the advance money to receive required number of cylinders or he is facing infrastructure bottlenecks,” Mr. Ramgopal said.

The State-level coordinator said, “we have come across huge number of complaints against distributing agencies. We are now in a process to verify address of computer-based customers. We are also keeping track of routine supply of cylinders.”

If any distributor was found to be violating norms, he would be penalised under Marketing Disciplinary Guidelines-2001, he said.

However, the association of distributors has moved High Court challenging enforcement of MDG-2001. As per the interim injunction, any action taken in pursuance of the MDG-2001 shall be subject to result of writ petition. It appears that distributors are in no mood to be governed by guidelines.

Mr. Ramgopal said three oil companies were in process of appointing eight more distributors in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack to ease the situation.

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