A majority of LPG consumers are unlikely to get nine cylinders as promised by the state government in the light of the attached precondition that only the number of cylinders used the previous year would be allotted in the coming years as well.
Many of the households got only up to seven cylinders last year due to the delay in the delivery of LPG cylinders by the IOC for various reasons.
In effect, these households will only get six or seven cylinders this accounting year too.
The state government has set nine cylinders as the maximum limit, with subsidy. What remains unclear is the period for assessing last year and this year.
Ernakulam district supply officer M.C. Radhamani said she had not received any order in this regard so far and hence was unclear about the implementation of the whole scheme.
Officials with the ministry of civil supplies also said that an order to this effect was yet to be issued and the current year would in all probability be from Oct. 1, 2012 and the previous year from Oct. 1, 2011 to September 30, 2012.
“IOC is implementing the six-cylinder scheme from Oct. 1, 2012 and hence the previous year can only be prior to that,” said an official.
A spate of strikes by tanker lorry operators and workers at the bottling plants and also the Chala tanker tragedy had led to the disruption in LPG supply several times this year.
Consequently, a majority of IOC consumers had been getting a cylinder delivered more than one-and-a-half months after booking.