After a cleaner Ganga, residents of PM Narendra Modi's constituency Varanasi and 16 other eastern cities can also look forward to breathing cleaner air. The Narendra Modi government has pulled out from the cold storage a Rs 10,000 crore pipeline project that would make it possible to provide CNG and PNG services in these cities and revive sick fertilizer plants in the region.
The new pipeline would help the government revive defunct fertilizer plants at Gorakhpur in UP, Barauni in Bihar, Sindri in Jharkhand and Durgapur in West Bengal by supplying gas, considered a cheaper feedstock than naphtha. In addition, the pipeline will also supply natural gas to refineries at Barauni and Haldia, steel industries, power plants and other large manufacturing units in the region.
The blueprint of the pipeline was drawn and approved years ago during the UPA regime. But Gail was reluctant to start work as it did not find the project economically feasible in the absence of anchor consumers -- essentially big and medium industries. But with the Modi government making a commitment in Parliament to develop the eastern region, Gail now sees prospects improving for major consumers.
The oil ministry under Dharmendra Pradhan had recently tweaked the domestic gas allotment policy to speed up CNG and PNG services in the country to reduce vehicular pollution and subsidy on diesel and kitchen fuels. Under the changed policy, CNG and PNG services would get domestic gas for all of their demand. Domestic gas costs three times less than imported liquid gas, providing cheaper fuels for consumers.
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