Ahmedabad: Hours after opposition Congress staged protest claiming a (LPG) or cooking gas cylinders and natural gas in the state, Gujarat chief minister Bhupendra Patel in a public function on Friday claimed that there was no scarcity of these resources in the state and cautioned people to stay away from rumours regarding any such shortage.
“No one will face cooking gas shortage. There is no need to run around without any reason,” the chief minister said in a public function in Gandhinagar. He said that though the government has no control over this “global issue”, it is trying to ensure no one faces any hardship.
Later, in a statement, too, the government claimed that “sufficient quantities of petrol, diesel and LPG” were available.
It said that instruction had been issued to “keep a gap of 25 days in urban areas and 45 days in rural areas between bookings of two cylinders by a single customer. So that unnecessary online bookings are not made by the customers and the load on the server can be reduced.”
The statement urged people to save cooking gas by using “cookers, soak and boil the rice, and use solar cookers as an alternative energy source.” It also suggested keeping the temperature of the AC at 25 degrees Celsius or more for saving energy in the house.
It further added that the government is also distributing kerosene for families of poorest of the poor households in rural and urban areas for cooking and lighting. It said that the state had received an ad-hoc quantity of 1,452 KL (kiloliters) of kerosene from the union government.
Despite government’s claim, queues continue to swell outside gas agencies across the state as people scramble to secure cooking gas cylinder in a state of panic due to the uncertainty surrounding the Iran War.
Earlier in the day, a dozen MLAs of Congress led by state Congress president Amit Chavda and senior party leader Tushar Chaudhary reached the assembly with posters and LPG cylinders to highlight the shortage. The budget session is currently underway in the state assembly.
Chavda claimed while talking to media that people were being forced to stand in long queues to get cooking gas cylinders. He also claimed that people were facing difficulties in getting their cylinders refilled.