Gas to Anil firm if available: FM

The government today said allocation of natural gas to companies like Anil Ambani Group's RNRL would depend on availability of the fuel after supplying to already designated users.

Allocation to new plants like Anil Ambani Group's proposed power plant in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, would be made “when the gas will be available. I cannot be distributing a non-existing and non-available resource”, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said here.

The comment comes within days of the apex court upholding the government's sovereign right on gas, while giving its verdict on the four-year-old gas pricing dispute between the group companies of Mukesh and Anil Ambani.

“We had already taken certain decision. Those decisions ought to the implemented... For certain sectors, we had indicated that gas will be available to you as and when you are in a position to take the gas (or) absorb the gas,” Mukherjee said.

The Supreme Court had on May 7 rejected RNRL's plea for 28 million standard cubic metres per day (mscmd) gas at $2.34 per million British thermal unit (mBtu) — 44 per cent lower than government approved rates, for 17 years from RIL under a 2005 private family agreement between brothers Mukesh and Anil.

The court had asked them to renegotiate the deal in conformity with the government policy. Mukherjee, who headed ministerial panels that approved the $4.2 per mBtu price for gas from Reliance Industries' KG-D6 fields, fixed its users and decided on the government's intervention in the Ambani gas dispute, welcomed last week's Supreme Court verdict establishing the government's right over the national resource.

“I am happy with the judgment as it clearly established the authority of the government” as the owner of the natural resource to fix price and users of the fuel as per national priorities, he told CNBC TV18.