Now, it could be a reality as you would soon get your petrol and diesel home-delivered. The Petroleum Ministry is mulling various options of door-to-door delivery service on pre-booking of your fuel which will not only cut the consumers’ long queues at petrol pumps but also facilitate them to get their fuel easily at home.
“Options being explored where petro products may be door-delivered to consumers on pre-booking,” the Ministry said in a series of tweets.
The move comes at a time when the world’s third biggest oil consumer experiments with daily price revision of petrol and diesel at select towns beginning May 1. In another tweet, the Ministry also said home delivery of fuel would help consumers avoid spending excessive time and long queues at fuel stations.”
As per official data, as many as 3.5 crore people currently visit 59,595 petrol pumps in the country for buying auto fuel. Often, long queues are witnessed at petrol pumps during peak hours, leading to congestion on roads. Annually, Rs 2,500 crore of fuel is bought at petrol pumps and now a part of it being talked of being home delivered.
As per the Ministry statistics, India consumed 23.8 million tons of petrol and 76 million tons of diesel in 2016-17 fiscal. This was higher than 21.8 million tons of petrol and 74.6 million tons of diesel consumed in the previous 2015-16 financial year.
The Ministry also stated that a Parliamentary Consultative Committee which met in Srinagar on Friday to discuss digital modes of payment at fuel outlets. However, the Ministry official data said, state-owned oil marketing companies IOC, BPCl and HPCl give 0.75 per cent discount on fuel purchase via cashless mode. “About 40,000 retail outlet (ROs) are with POS (machine), more than 86 per cent of ROs with digital infrastructure today,” it said, adding that daily cashless transactions increased from Rs 150 crore per day to Rs 400 crore per day.
Meanwhile, the Government on Friday also disapproved petrol pump dealers’ demand to close fuel outlets on every Sunday from May 14, saying that the Petroleum Ministry does not approve or endorse the move.
“The Petroleum Ministry does not approve or endorse the move by a section of petrol pump dealers to close down fuel stations on Sundays,” Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan told the panel at a meeting in Srinagar.
Earlier this week, the Consortium of Indian Petroleum Dealers informed the media of their decision to shut fuel bunks every Sunday starting May 14 to protest the public sector oil companies’ failure to hike dealer margins. The decision will cover Haryana, Maharashtra and the entire southern region - Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala as well as Puducherry.
However, the Ministry sources said that the threat to shut down pumps on Sundays would be dealt with according to measures necessary to maintain supplies of essential commodities as petroleum products come under this category.