Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The LPG infrastructure in India, over the last decade from 2014 to 2024, has surged with the bottling capacity shooting up by close to 70 per cent while the number of consumers has soared by nearly 125 per cent during this period, the Parliament was told on July 21.
“India now has one of the most robust LPG supply infrastructure globally. Before April 2014, nearly 45 per cent of Indian households didn’t have access to clean cooking fuels and were constrained to depend on traditional fuels such as cow dung, biomass and firewood,” Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Suresh Gopi told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.
Prices of cooking gas in India, after the latest round of reduction, are one of the lowest globally, and even lower than in most LPG-producing nations, he added.
The retail price of a 14.2 kg LPG cylinder in Delhi is around Rs 803 while its price in Pakistan, as on May 1 this year, is Rs 1,017.25. In Sri Lanka, the price of a 14.2 kg LPG cylinder is Rs 1,320.94 and in Nepal, it is Rs 1,207.84, the minister said.
As India imports more than 60 per cent of its domestic LPG consumption, prices of LPG in the country are linked to its price in the international market and the Government continues to modulate the effective price to consumers for domestic LPG.