The governing body of Kolkata’s Urbana residential complex sent out a message to all residents on the curtailment of pipeline gas supply to households, as the domestic LPG crisis deepened in the city.
“From March 11, gas supply will be stopped from 2pm to 5pm, and from 10pm to 4am at night,” said the notice, with the assurance that once the situation normalises there would be no disruption.
Amidst the chaos and panic, many complexes with pipeline gas supplies have taken precautionary measures.
At the Presidency University’s Hindu Hostel, the kitchen has been shut for the last three days.
“There are presently 120 boarders in the hostel. They have been forced to buy food from outside, or return to their homes,” said a boarder.
Rajabazar hostels are facing the same scenario, as cylinders have been completely emptied.
Iskcon Kolkata has had to significantly cut down on prasad because of this crisis. Radha Romon Das, a representative of Iskcon, said, “We have had to decrease the quantity of prasad significantly due to the ongoing crisis.”
The situation is the same at the Digha Jagannath temple, where the quantity of prasad had to be reduced drastically.
The rush of booking LPG cylinders has overwhelmed booking systems of oil marketing companies, with distributors reporting repeated server crashes due to the surge in refill requests.
With digital booking systems becoming unreliable, a large number of consumers have started visiting distributor offices to place orders in person, resulting in long queues from early morning in many neighbourhoods.
“This is panic buying,” said Bijan Biswas, spokesperson for the Indane LPG Distributors' Association in Bengal. "Many people are afraid they might not get another cylinder soon, and that has led to this crisis," he said.
Biswas said booking servers were frequently going down for four to five hours at a stretch as consumers tried to book through mobile apps, websites and call centres.
There have also been reports of black marketing and hoarding of LPG cylinders in some areas amid the supply crunch, prompting authorities to step up monitoring of distributors and delivery channels.
“Any customer or vendor found to be buying gas on the black market, or hoarding gas cylinders will have their customer ID banned for further use,” said an official of Hindustan Petroleum.