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• The district and state administration are yet take steps to mitigate the escalating cooking gas crisis owing to the strike of the tanker lorries across south India, and if the matter is not sorted out at Monday’s conciliatory talks in Chennai, things will go out of hand.The consumers of Indane cooking gas of the Indian Oil Corporation in five districts of Ernakulam, Thrissur, Kottayam, Idukki and Alappuzha will be worst hit with the Udayamperoor bottling plant of IOC coming to a standstill from Monday.

• Since the strike began on March 1, the Udayamperoor plant has been affected, but it was functioning with the existing stock, which ran out on Saturday. Sunday was a holiday for the plant and according to official sources it will function for namesake on Monday, since very limited stock is left and will have to close after that.There are 40 tankers supplying to the Udayampero-or plant daily and fifty per cent of this is from the KRL in Kochi. According to district collector Mr Sheikh Pareeth, the district administration is awaiting a directive from the state government to initiate measures to retrieve the situation. The options before it include seizing the tankers and operating it at least from KRL to Udayamperoor.

• The new strike has hit at a time when consumers of Indane in these districts were recovering from the impact of a strike by the tanker operators in mid-January .The BPCL and HPCL, the two other oil companies in the cooking gas business are not affected in Ernakulam since they have dedicated pipeline from KRL to their bottling plants nearby.The latest blow comes when Indane consumers are jittery over the recent explosions involving the Indane gas cylinders. An IOC official dismissed any suggestion linking such incidents to the strikes or related laxity in the system.

• The official said that with the impact of the strike in the past three days, there is a lag of 10-15 days in the delivery of LPG units. “Normally a customer books his next cylinder the moment a fresh one arrives and we could meet this order within 30 days.Since the January strike, we had brought it back to this normal level a week ago, but again it is going out of hand with this fresh bout of strike, but we are hopeful that things will be sorted out at tomorrow’s conciliatory talks in Chennai,” the official said, preferring anonymity.

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