New Delhi:
Cooking gas LPG users, who often face rude and uncooperative dealers when booking refills, will now be able to not only track their request status online but they will also be able to find out if someone is jumping the queue or the cylinder is finding way into commercial establishments.
Oil Ministry and the three state-owned oil marketing companies today launched the LPG Portal that will host data of nearly 14 crore LPG consumers in the country.
Through the portal, consumers can access information on LPG usage pattern of any consumer, including ministers and VIPs in the country, cooking cylinder booking status, LPG refill history, highest consumption consumers and subsidy availed.
The information on the portal can also be sorted by the consumer number, consumer name and by distributor's name, Oil Minister S Jaipal Reddy said announcing the launch of the portal.
The LPG Transparency portal can be accessed through the official website of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas - www.petroleum.nic.in.
Access is also available through respective oil company websites - www.indane.co.in; www.ebharatgas.com and www.hindustanpetroleum.com.
"The three oil marketing companies supply over 32 lakhs cylinders per day," Mr Reddy said, adding the subsidy on domestic LPG is likely to jump to Rs 43,000 crore this year from 30,000 crore last year.
The Rs 396 per cylinder differential between the price of domestic LPG cylinder and those available for commercial use, often leads to subsidised fuel getting diverted to unintended users.
Through the portal one can see if cylinders have been booked under his name when the person has not put in a request for them.
Mr Reddy said a system has been put in place "to capture the complete details of customers and track their LPG consumption pattern with an aim to increase transparency in LPG supply chain".
"These portals provide complete details of each customer with their consumer numbers, name, address, number of cylinders supplied, dates of supply as well as the indicative subsidy amount for the cylinders supplied," he said.
It also features quick search options to find one's distributor, sort information based on consumer number and consumer name, see the highest off-take consumer or put in a request to surrender one's connection.
"Logging a complaint is just as easy. Consumers can now even rate the performance of their distributors; and this is expected to help the services to improve further," he said.
The data generated would help the government in implementing future schemes like restricting supply of subsidised cylinders per household.