Dealers demand more commission for cancelled LPG connections

NEW DELHI: The government has blocked 8.7 million cooking gas connections in the past year in its bid to identify genuine customers for the ‘ direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme, but this has hurt dealers, who are demanding a higher commission to make up for lost sales.

Customers who did not present their identity proofs and bank account details have been blocked from the LPG cylinder dealers’ list as they are suspected to have “presumably diverted” the cylinders without being officially enrolled, said an oil and natural gas ministry official. This has stopped diversion of around five crore cylinders and would help the oil companies save Rs 4,000 crore annually, he said.

The ministry hopes that this connection cancellation drive would help to subdue the prevailing black marketing of cylinders as the deduplication on inter company connections would cease to exist post the Aadhar roll out . The LPG cylinder dealers, however, think the opposite.

“With such a huge number of connections being declared invalid, a secondary market would emerge to tackle this demand,” said an All India LPG Dealer’s Federation (AILDF) executive. AILDF also said that their sales and income has plummeted with the connections getting cancelled under the new Aadhar based LPG sale.