Step on the gas

Artificial LPG shortage

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As always, at a time of crisis, it is the people clinging to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder who are suffering the most. In the wake of the Indian economic blockade, the prices of daily edibles like vegetables and cooking oil have rocketed. They are being sold at least twice the normal price, if they are at all available in the market. Take the example of cooking gas. Over the past one month there has been an acute shortage of LPG gas cylinders in all the major markets in Nepal. But not for people who were ready to fork out (the current going rate) of Rs 10,000 for a cylinder of LPG which otherwise costs just Rs 1,400. This is the reason even the limited amount of LPG imported from India quickly disappears. This travesty of justice was repeated on Saturday when thousands of consumers who had been queuing up for cooking gas since early hours were turned away empty handed. They were justifiably aggrieved. On Friday all the big gas industries had announced that they would distribute half-filled LPG cylinders through their depots on Saturday.

So where did the 20 bullets of gas—enough to fill 50,000 cylinders in half—that have been recently imported from India disappear? According to media reports, all the imported LPG was sold overnight to big hotels and restaurants, for as much as Rs 10,000 a cylinder. Had these industries decided to sell to common Nepalis at Maximum Retail Price instead, they would have gotten only a fraction of the bonanza they struck by selling at industrial scale. In other words, this is a clear case of black-marketing. But except sporadic arrests of those selling adulterated petrol products, the government so far has done little to control the larger black-marketing. To restore public confidence it must investigate into the latest vanishing act of cooking gas and punish wrongdoers. All the cylinders that have been hoarded by big private establishments should be confiscated and distributed at MRP to regular consumers on first-come-first-serve basis. This is not just a matter of justice.
If the government fails to check such blatant cheating, public anger will slowly rise. Already, there have been instances of fisticuffs as people have tried to outmuscle one another to get their hands on an LPG cylinder or to secure a couple of liters of petrol from the mobbed petrol stations. Still, by and large, Nepali people have thus far shown great patience, for they believe that India is behind the acute shortage of essentials and the resulting price rise. But they are starting to find, to their great shock, it’s not all India’s doing and their own government may be complicit. This loss of faith in a democratically elected government could in turn have all kinds of undesirable consequences, which is perhaps exactly what the blockade enforcers want. This dangerous slide in public confidence must be halted. But in the three weeks since its election, the KP Oli government, we are sorry to say, has done nothing substantial for the benefit of the common man.