After a three-day-long uncertainty over the extension of time for seeding Aadhaar with LPG distributors and bank accounts to avail of subsidy, the supply of domestic cooking gas cylinders limped back to normalcy on Saturday.
Most gas agencies in the district experienced heavy rush when supply of subsidised gas cylinders to consumers who are yet to seed the Aadhaar number eventually resumed. Gas agencies expect normal business to be restored only in the coming days. The larger the customer base of the agency, greater would be the time taken for the return of normalcy.
“Consumers are turning up in large numbers to take delivery of refills and to link their Aadhaar number. Even those consumers who have had Aadhaar but had not bothered to link it earlier are now doing so,” said K. Jose, a dealer of BP Gas at Vazhakkala. A.R. Venugopal, a Tripunithura-based LPG dealer of 30-years standing, felt that it would take almost a fortnight for things to be normal. His agency, for instance, delivers 500-600 cylinders a day on an average. “We cannot increase it beyond extra 100-120 cylinders in the coming days since it would be impossible to press into the delivery chain new staff with no idea about the address and location of consumers,” he said.
Meanwhile, the bottling plant of all three oil companies in the district resumed almost normal course of operations on Saturday. With most of the backlog cleared on Friday, the IOC bottling plant at Udayamperur resumed bottling to the previous levels and expect the situation to return to normal within a couple of days.
