The Bihar Petroleum Dealers' Association announced on Saturday that all 2,400 petrol pumps in the state will remain closed on July 12.

The association will go on a daylong strike in protest against the recently implemented dynamic pricing system.

It has also decided to go for a nationwide "no purchase-no sale" of fuel on July 12.

Prabhat Kumar Singh, president, Bihar Petroleum Dealers' Association, said: "The dealers are incurring losses due to the government's decision to revise petrol and diesel prices in which rates of petrol/diesel changes on a day-to-day basis. The daily revision of prices are causing problem for the dealers to manage their inventory. There is also lack of transparency in the daily dynamic pricing of the fuel."

From June 16, state-run oil marketing companies are revising the fuel prices daily.

Before that, the fuel prices were reviewed by the oil companies every fortnight while taking global fuel prices and the rupee-dollar exchange rate into account. Rates change at 6am every day depending on movement in cost on the previous day. The dynamic fuel pricing or daily revision of retail selling prices was initially implemented on a pilot basis in Udaipur, Jamshedpur, Visakhapatnam, Chandigarh and Pondicherry from May 1 before its implementation last month.

Singh said: "We took the decision to go on strike after our demands were not met. We had a stormy meeting with oil marketing companies on June 29. They agreed with us and had assured that price protection will be taken care of. However, they could not give us any specific date for implementation of price protection, for which we all walked out in protest. They requested us to wait till June 30 for their re-consideration but no fruitful result has come out. Hence, we decided to resort to a no-purchase-no sale agitation on July 12 across the country." The petroleum dealers had held a similar "No-purchase-no sale agitation" on July 5 also.

The association is also protesting against the proposed move of the central government wherein all petroleum products - not just LPG cylinders - will be delivered at consumers' doorstep.

Options are being explored where petro products may be door-delivered to consumers on pre-booking.

This would help consumers avoid spending excessive time and long queues at fuel stations," minister of state for petroleum and natural gas Dharmendra Pradhan had said on April 21 this year.

There are many flaws in the proposed home delivery options for petroleum products, Singh said, adding: "The petroleum ministry has stringent rules on loading and unloading, refuelling, and transportation of fuel. All these aspects have not been addressed under the home delivery option. Again, there is a serious possibility of theft of fuel or replacing it with sub-standard quality of petrol and diesel under the proposed scheme resulting in cheating of consumers."

There are transportation problems too with the home delivery system as taking tankers to congested colonies will be a difficult task, Singh added.