The committee on suggesting fair price of natural gas to the end-consumer, chaired by former Planning Commission member Kirit Parikh, has sought a month’s time from the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas (MoPNG) to submit its recommendations on domestic gas prices

Speaking to BusinessLine, Parikh, who is the Chairman of the Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe), said “We have sought a month’s time for report on administered price mechanism (APM) gas. We will submit the report on this by October-end, and the full report in November this year.”

The committee includes officials from state-run firms ONGC, IOC, OIL and GAIL, private city gas distribution (CGD) operators, industry association, and the Fertiliser Ministry.

Parikh, who is the founder of Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (Mumbai), emphasised that the pricing policy should reflect the interest of the country. For instance, Gas is crucial for sectors such as fertilisers on which India’s food security depends.

India meets half of its natural gas requirement through domestic production, while the other half is imported as liquified natural gas (LNG).

Gas price revision

The government on Friday revised the price of domestic natural gas upwards by 40 per cent to $8.57 per mBtu for the second half of FY23. The gas price ceiling for extracting the key commodity from challenging fields has also been revised upwards by around 25 per cent to $12.46 per million British thermal units (mBtu). Prices have been raised largely in line with the uptick in international prices.

This is the highest price for procuring natural gas in the country since the government introduced the New Domestic Gas Pricing Guidelines in November 2014.

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