The Hindu Business Line : Tale of two LPGs

THE other day in a mixed gathering of intellectuals, housewives and commoners, a highbrow speaker lampooned them for being obsessed with the mundane LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) when the Western world was enjoying the fruits of the other LPG — liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation.

The housewives, especially from the middle- and lower-income groups, are reeling under the steadily spiralling LPG prices. Small wonder their obsession with the LPG of the mundane variety. They perhaps would have been enamoured of the other LPG had the Government taken steps to arrest the increase in the prices of petroleum products through the process of `modernisation' which is conspicuous by its absence in the abbreviated expression with a brand new expansion.

Successive governments have shrugged off the entire issue of mounting petroleum prices as an international phenomenon on which they have no control. The distribution of petroleum products leaves a lot to be desired. A lot of fuel is burnt in carrying the fuel. And the tab is picked up by the hapless customer. The Government ought to have accorded high priority to streamlining the distribution of petroleum products through pipelines and, in the process, phased out the innately wasteful and expensive mode of distributing through trucks and tankers. The short point is one cannot be blamed for bemoaning a thing which hurts him. And it is idle to expect one to feign knowledge of buzzwords and be counted in the circle of pseudo-intellectuals.

The NDA government paid a heavy price for fostering this tendency. Little did it realise that for the common man, words like privatisation and globalisation would be mere rhetoric unless they make a qualitative difference to the way he lives.

Privatisation of power distribution in Delhi, for example, has gone well neither with the chatterati nor the glitterati. Many of them complain that the transition is from fire to frying pan. Small wonder one associates privatisation with licence for unbridled increase in prices. If the LPG of the mundane variety were going to be available a lot cheaper, thanks to the LPG of the pinstriped executives and pseudo-intellectuals, only then the latter would be widely talked about. And in the seminar circuits, speakers would do well to address issues dispassionately offering practical solutions to festering problems. To be sure, Western solutions can be imported but care must be taken to dovetail them to our conditions and milieu.

(The author is a Delhi-based chartered accountant.)

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