Oil ministry mulling home delivery of petrol & diesel

Petrol and diesel may soon be home delivered as the oil ministry mulls options of door-to-door delivery on pre-booking to cut long queues at petrol pumps.

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.

"Options being explored where petro products may be door delivered to consumers on pre-booking," the ministry said in a series of tweets.

Home delivery of fuel is being mulled as 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 said home delivery of fuel "would help consumers avoid spending excessive time and long queues at fuel stations."

"About 3.5 cr people come to fuel stations every day; Rs 2500 cr worth of transactions every year," it said in another tweet.

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 met in Srinagar today to discuss 'digital modes of payment' at fuel outlets.

State-owned oil marketing companies IOC, BPCL and HPCL give "0.75 per cent discount on fuel purchase via cashless mode," it said. "About 40,000 ROs are with POS (machine), more than 86 per cent of ROs with digital infrastructure today."

Meanwhile, state-run Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) today said it will raise up to USD 300 million in the next 18 months from overseas.

"We have already filed our application. We will be filing for medium-term note programme in London (stock exchange) as well as in Singapore (stock exchange). We will be raising USD 150-300 million on both the exchanges," IREDA Chairman K S Popli told reporters here.

The company will raise a part of the amount, around USD 100 million, in 2-3 months, he said, adding that the entire money raised will be utilised for lending.

"100 million (dollar) we would raise soon and total amount we will raise within a year and half," he said.

On IPO, he said: "I am still waiting for getting approval. I would not like to comment on it right now." The company had last month said it will sanction Rs 13,000 crore for clean energy projects in this fiscal in the country, vying for around 20 per cent of the loan market share.

IREDA has sanctioned around Rs 37,000 crore of credit for clean energy projects in the country so far and has released around Rs 28,000 crore to developers, which aids generation capacity of around 7,000 MW. IREDA is a public Limited government company established as a non-banking financial institution in 1987.