Cooking gas is to be supplied directly at steel city homes via pipes from December with several housing complexes in the Sonari area likely to be the first beneficiaries.

State-owned GAIL (India), which is executing the 1,500km Urja Ganga Gas pipeline project in UP and Odisha via Jharkhand and Bihar, is targeting to reach 2,000 homes in Jamshedpur by March next year.

“We have started laying the pipeline for the natural gas supply to homes. The supply will begin with Ashiana Gardens in Sonari and a few nearby housing societies,” said D.B. Soren, the GAIL official supervising the project in Jamshedpur.

The natural gas company, which has set up a camp office at a city hotel, will be putting up a decompression unit near the Tribal Culture Centre at Sonari to facilitate supplies.

“The decompression unit will continue to function until such time the pipeline laying work between Uttar Pradesh, via Odisha and Jharkhand gets completed. A cluster of cylinders containing natural gas (referred to as cascade) will be transported from Uttar Pradesh to the Sonari decompression unit from where homes would be supplied gas through pipelines. But, once the work of laying pipes is complete the decompression unit would cease to function,” Soren told The Telegraph.

The work to lay pipes is proceeding on a war footing along Marine Drive where there are several housing societies, including Ashiana Gardens.

Officials at GAIL India’s Calcutta project office revealed that in Jamshedpur they would cover 25,000 homes in the next five years. GAIL, they said, would also come up with CNG stations for vehicles.

GAIL is laying pipelines in various parts of the state, including Bokaro and Ranchi. But work in Ranchi had been stalled as the PSU has not got land to set up CNG stations (for vehicles) and centralised supply stations from where cooking gas, or PNG (piped natural gas), would be supplied to homes.

The Telegraph had reported earlier that because there was no readily available government land, the Ranchi district administration had asked the PSU to rework plans.

According to the 2011 census, Ranchi has 5,69,444 households. GAIL's target is to provide 29,962 gas connections in five years.

The Urja Ganga Gas pipeline project, estimated to cost Rs 51,000 crore, was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016. It is meant to be completed by 2019. In the first phase, 1,500km of gas pipeline is to be laid, and 2,540km in the second phase.

Around 500km of the pipeline will pass through Jharkhand from Bokaro to Ranchi to East Singhbhum from where it would be linked to Rourkela in Odisha.