A burning issue

Administration has failed to resolve the issue of cooking gas shortage, P.S chauhan reports:

Every summer as the yatra season starts, the holy city starts reeling under a crisis of shortage of domestic gas cylinders. The crisis is mainly triggered by a heavy influx of tourists and pilgrims in the district in this season, causing an increase in the demand of gas cylinders in the hotels, dhabas, sweets shops, dharmshalas, ashrams etc. The problem becomes more acute during the mela days, which continues for weeks together.

"We have to wait for about 2-3 weeks from the date of booking to get a cylinder and stand in long queues for hours to book the gas," complains Shusheel Rana. Says Nisha Gupta, a housewife of Rajghat Kankhal, "Though there is difficulty in procuring a cylinder in routine manner, the cylinders are easily available in the market, if you are willing to pay Rs. 500/- -600/- instead of the fixed rate. The district supply officer, D.S. Pangti says that there are more than 2 lakh domestic gas connections. "However, the supply of the companies falls short by about 30k cylinders per month." The obvious reason of the shortage is that the gas companies do not want to incur losses since the domestic gas cylinders are heavily subsidized. Another reason is the wide use of domestic gas cylinders for commercial purposes. "Since commercial cylinders are not subsidized, there is a big difference in the cost of the domestic and the commercial LPG cylinders. The cost of a commercial cylinder at this time is about Rs. 1200/-, whereas that of a domestic LPG cylinder is only about Rs. 400/-. The use of domestic cylinders for commercial purposes further adds to the shortage," says Naeem Qureshi of Jwalapur. The situation has become still more grim due to spurt in the population of the district as a result of the setting up of hundreds of vast industrial units. Though two new gas agencies have been given licence this year and some new domestic connections have also been issued, yet it is not in proportion to the spiralling population. A racket was busted at Jwalapur, which used to refill the small cylinders of 5kg. with the gas taken out from the LPG cylinders. There have also been complaints of under weight cylinders. The officials in the civil supply department say that they have issued instructions to the food and civil supply inspectors to conduct raids if there is any complaint. To ease the situation a plan has been mooted to increase the capacity of the bottling plant of the Indian Oil corporation at Bahadrabad near Haridwar. However, the plan has been hanging fire for the last many years.