With many streets contained due to COVID-19 positive cases in the city, the supply of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders has been affected.
“Certain localities have a high number of cases and supplies in these areas are being delayed by a day at the maximum,” said a distributor.
Gas deliverymen have been asked to not collect empty cylinders or cash from homes with positive cases, considering the risk. “We ask customers to pay using e-wallets and have told delivery personnel not to insist upon signatures in the bill if they give us the one-time code. We collect the empty cylinders after a week. Each day, every deliveryman goes to at least five such homes and it is double the work to collect empty cylinders separately,” said another distributor.
Distributors also said there were issues with supplies from bottling plants since there too, staff and workers had been affected by COVID-19 cases. “The situation is slowly returning to normalcy now. Most agencies have an average backlog of around 1.5 days,” said a distributor.
Meanwhile, sources in Indian Oil Corporation said that they had been organising vaccination camps for deliverymen, who were above 45 years of age but not many were interested in taking the vaccines. “They are afraid, and in many cases do not want to take it since they would have to take leave due to the side effects. We are asking distributors to convince their delivery men,” said a company official.
