Q: what is the status of the piped gas project in Indore? Do you guys thing that this project will influence the real estate investment market here in any way?
See I know for a fact that AGL can easily supply 15 lakh standard cubic meter of gas every day. This will easily cover the whole city, as a single household needs an average of 0.5 SCM of gas supply daily.
Basically the residents are worried that the supply might run out in the future with increasing demand, and they will be left with no fuel source if they give up their LPG cylinders. So now the AGL officials are trying to allay their fears, so the project can achieve something of their original goals.
From what I know, at present, piped gas is available in Ram Bagh, Kalani Nagar, Vijay Nagar and operations have recently been launched in Saket and Telephone Nagar. They are also now laying pipeline network for providing piped gas in South Tukoganj and Goyal Nagar colonies.
This undertaking is by the Avantika Gas Ltd (AGL), which is basically a joint venture company of GAIL India and Hindustan Petroleum. The current situation of the project is that the company has enough capacity to supply enough gas to every single house hold daily.
I think the authorities have to convince the people that once they have piped gas they will not need LPG cylinders. Anyway, surrendering a cylinder does not mean that they will not be able to get it back in case they wanted to switch back to LPG in future.
I dont understand why people are so against this, its really beneficial. Firstly, we wont have to worry about booking cylinders. Also, gas bills will come down as the government has capped the number of subsidized LPG cylinders to 12 per year.
There is a general distrust among the Indoreans, most of them are refusing to hand over their cyinders. Actually they are not aware that these PNG pipelines will be safer for them. With a couple of safety measures in place, the risk of accidents will come down significantly.
The plan is to set up around 1.2 Lakh PNG connections by the fiscal year 2016-17, but obviously they are lagging behind their goal by a huge margin. For this connection, the Indoreans have to surrender their LPG cylinders for the new PNG connection.
To be honest the piped gas project hasnt been able to achieve what it set out to do. The plan was to set up 500 connections by March of 2012. But obviously that didnt happen.So far only something around 2000 PNG connections have been set up.