Nearly 1.9 lakh LPG consumers wait for refills in Patna amid supply fears

Patna: A waiting list of 1,89,006 consumers now reflects the scale of the cooking gas crisis in Patna district as the conflict in West Asia continues to disrupt the local energy supply chain, even though the Patna administration maintains that there is no shortage in the supply of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).

These are consumers who have booked their LPG cylinders but are yet to receive delivery.Data from the Patna district administration shows that while 47,168 cylinders arrive from oil companies daily, the number of bookings on Thursday alone reached 35,848. This surge has largely been attributed to households booking refills prematurely out of fear of a total supply collapse.Across 136 gas agencies catering to 16,65,360 consumers, the average daily sale of 39,259 cylinders remains staggered and insufficient to clear the massive queue of households waiting for refills.

“It will take almost a week to 10 days for the situation to stabilise and for the backlog to reduce,” additional district magistrate, supply, Ravindra Kumar Diwakar said.He added that the supply is currently more than the demand, and on average around 5,000 people are being removed daily from the waitlist. He explained that at one point, due to the regular distribution of cylinders, demand will come to a point of saturation, which will stabilise the situation.

For now, when the demand reduces, the supply will be constant, and the backlog will therefore reduce.The strategy relies on the fact that once the 1.6 million consumers have received their immediate refills, the “panic booking” cycle will break. By maintaining a steady influx of over 47,000 cylinders against a natural daily consumption rate, officials expect the surplus to eventually outpace the spike in bookings caused by the geopolitical climate.