By NAYAN DAVE
Petrol pumps across Gujarat are witnessing shortage of diesel and petrol over the past four-five days as many pumps running out of diesel due to short supply and as result long queues are being seen outside those outlets where both the fossil fuels are available.
Confirming the development, Arvind Thakker, president of Federation of Gujarat Petroleum Dealers’ Association (FGPDA) claimed that there has been at least 20 percent short supply to more than 2500 retail petroleum dealers of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL). Due to short supply, many petrol pumps were forced to close sales till they received fresh supply from both these companies, said Thakker.
According to FGPDA, out of nearly 1200 petrol pumps owned by private players including Reliance Industries Limited’s (RIL), Nayara Energy and Shell nearly 70 percent are closed. Echoing him, Pavan Kumar Sehgal, CGM HPCL said that as regular customers of private company owned petrol pumps shifted to us, demand of petrol and diesel have increased suddenly.
“Our supply to retail outlets hasn’t been curtailed. It is because of unprecedented demands of petrol and especially of diesel, some of the petrol pumps shut for a few hours. We are working on increasing the quantity of both the fuels to ensure that end users wouldn’t have to suffer,” said Sehgal.
When contacted, a RIL spokesperson refute to comment on the issue. In the case of Nayara Energy, there wasn’t any answer to Financial Express’s query on how many of their outlets are functioning in Gujarat and across the country. Around a month ago, a similar situation prevailed with the private company’s outlets in the state in wake of unprecedented volatility in fuel prices. A retail dealer of a private petroleum company said that in any case very few end-users are coming to us as prices of PSU oil company’s petrol pumps are less. Luckily there has been adequate supply of CNG, otherwise there could have been havoc on most of the outlets, he added. There are more than 4500 petrol pumps of private and government owned companies in Gujarat. These outlets are selling nearly 55 crore litre of diesel and 25 crore litre of petrol monthly.
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