'LPG imports cut by $1 billion backed by government measures'

Giving a boost to the petroleum ministry's effort to cut import bill, India has cancelled import deals for liquefied petroleum gas worth $1 billion owing to a demand drop due to capping of cylinders, success of know your customer scheme and implementation direct benefit transfer, a senior petroleum ministry official said today.  

 

Oil companies have cancelled import deals for 865,000 tonne from the period starting from March 2012-December 2013, due to a fall in demand, said a senior petroleum ministry official close to the development. 

 

While the country’s annual demand for LPG is 15 million tonne, around 9 MT is produced domestically and about 6 million tonne is imported. “This would mean that the imports would come down by about 1 MT, there by saving us $ 1 billion. This could save us 10-15% of the total LPG subsidy bill,” he added.  The total revenue loss that the public sector oil marketing companies had suffered last year on sales of LPG was Rs 39,558 crore. 

 

Last year, the government had capped the number of subsidised LPG cylinders to six per household and later increased it to nine per year. Moreover, in order to cut down duplication and illegal connections too, companies had introduced know your customer scheme through which around 2 crore connections came under scrutiny. 

 

Meanwhile, petroleum minister M veerappa Moily today said that Aadhaar is not mandatory for receiving subsidized LPG in 19 districts, where DBT was rolled out in its first phase. Currently, DBT on LPG is being implemented in 97 districts of the country . The Supreme Court had said in in an interim order that the Aadhaar number cannot be not made mandatory for people to avail any government services. 

 

According to the ministry, the scheme helped in removing many illegal connections, out of 5 million connections that we had gone through, there were 45,000 consumers who had two subsidised LPG gas connections under different names and addresses. “This itself would save us around Rs 23 crore annually,” the official added.