The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Friday, November 10, 2000,
Chandigarh, India

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Cooking gas shortage likely
By Yoginder Gupta
Tribune News Service

CHANDIGARH, Nov 9 — The northern region is in for a shortage of liquid petroleum gas (cooking gas). The consumers of Indane, brand name owned by the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), will be the worst hit.

The crisis will not be caused by the shortage of LPG but by the under-performance of bottling plants of the corporation due to an agitation launched by a section of the employees over the past few days. While the employees say they are working as per the rules (work to rule in popular parlance), officers of the corporation say the employees have launched a go-slow agitation.

Already the supply of LPG cylinders from the bottling plants to Indane dealers in the region, particularly in Haryana, has been curtailed considerably. The dealers say if the supplies are not normalised within a couple of days, a huge backlog of refills will build up. A dealer confided that he had sent his truck to bring refills to a bottling plant a couple of days ago. He had been told today that he would get the supply after three days.

Informed sources say the Karnal bottling plant of the IOC, which supplies refills to most of the Haryana districts, is functioning at one-fourth of its capacity. Before the agitation the plant was filling about 100 truckloads of refills. One truckload is equal to 306 refills. Now only about 25 truckloads are being refilled.

The employees are agitating for pay revision. The IOC authorities delinked Chandigarh from the Karnal plant about a fortnight ago and attached it with the Nabha plant for LPG supply. The Nabha plant is relatively new and the employees there are yet to join the agitation. The sources say employees of the Nabha plant are also likely to join the stir soon.

The sources say if no early solution is found to the employees’ agitation, the situation is likely to worsen because the employees have given a call for a two-day strike from November 16.

The employees of the other oil companies, the sources say, are watching the outcome of the IOC agitation. Being the leader in the oil field, whatever decision the IOC takes on pay revision, it is usually followed by the rest of the industry.

Interestingly, there will be a spin-off of the employees’ work-to-rule agitation beneficial to the consumers. If the employees really work as per the rules, the consumers will not have to face the problem of leaking or underweight refills, a common problem these days. In order to achieve higher production, the supervisory staff at the bottling plants, the sources say, are not as particular as they should be about checking the proper weight of gas or leakage in refills on normal days. Workers also are casual in their approach. Now under the work-to-rule agitation the workers are insisting on checking each and every refill for correct weight and safety.

Unfortunately, senior officers of the IOC, the sources say, are also not very serious about the quality of refills supplied from the plants. They pass on the buck to the dealers, though under the guidelines issued by the Ministry of Petroleum it is the responsibility of the oil companies to ensure the “quantity and quality” of the cooking gas supplied to the consumers.

A few days ago a meeting of the local dealers was held with a senior officer of the IOC here. When a dealer raised the issue of leaking and underweight refills, the officer reportedly started finding fault with the dealer in order to cap inconvenient issues.