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Hours before the government announcement putting on hold direct subsidy transfer (DBTL) scheme for LPG consumers, there were complaints from various parts of the city against LPG dealers not delivering cylinders on time as they were burdened with NPR submission work.

The ongoing rush at LPG distributors' office to submit NPR (national population register) forms and photocopies of connection receipts over the past few days has led to excessive delay in delivery of cylinders to consumers. Even raising subsidy cap from 9 to 12 cylinders did not impress residents who are aware of poor delivery mechanism in the city.

Ideally the cylinder should reach at consumer's home within 3 days but even 10-12 days after booking they are not being delivered. Ritika Singh from Niralanagar says "I had booked a cylinder nine days back but have not received it yet. When I asked the agency, they said they were overburdened with NPR work."

Apart from complaints of poor delivery status, people are also complaining that dealers are refusing to do any other paperwork including renewing connection, giving new connection or registering change of address because of their current occupation. A resident from Vikasnagar cribbed he had gone to apply for new connection but was asked to come after 15 days.

Dealers, however, denied there was problem and claimed NPR work was being done by clerical staff while distribution was handled by delivery boys. A dealer said "only minor problems could have cropped up due to logistical issues like unavailability of staff, transaction error of bank or non-delivery of trucks but this doesn't mean NPR work is hampering our routine work. Complaints may have been area specific"

What the dealers did admit was that their focus right now was on form collection. "The delivery might have got delayed by a couple of days but that is not unusual and not related to NPR work," they said. But the fact is all clerical work including issuing new connections or formalities such change of owner's name or address, etc have suffered. Manager of an agency said "we can attend to routine queries only after 15 days as we are short of staff."

President of All India LPG Distributors Federation, UP chapter, DP Singh "demand for cylinder increases in the last quarter of a financial year as consumers want to avail all subsidised cylinders, which leads to rush and chaos at the distributors' office and results in supply shortage."

He informed people can avail 12 subsidised cylinders April onwards after the cabinet's approval. But in the current year, government has made provision to avail of only one extra cylinder each in February and March. While district administration has published the format of NPR form in newspapers and has asked people to download them from website lucknow.nic.in, many people don't know where to get it from Most people have no access to Internet or don't subscribe to newspapers and don't know about DBTL scheme or source of availing NPR form. Even distributors deny giving forms to the needy

There is lack of awareness among people about benefits of DBTL scheme and the process of NPR registration and bio-metric enrolment. Many still don't know how Aadhaar number, bank account and LPG connection number would get connected to avail subsidy

Not enough enumerators are trained for registering details of consumers in original NPR form. LMC had to deploy 300 enumerators for this work and train them rigorously but it has been able to train only 150 enumerators till date

The process of collecting and digitising forms is rather slow. Though NPR form submission started in city three days ago, LMC has been able to collect only 12,878 forms so far. Dealers claim more than 40,000 forms have been submitted Dealers are not verifying thoroughly details in the forms and simply collecting them. Ignorant and illiterate people who don't know how to fill the form need help from agencies but since they are already burdened with work, they have no time to answer their queries. The subsidy cap of 12 cylinders every year would begin from next financial year (April 2014 onwards). This year, people can book one extra cylinder in February and March besides the 9 subsidised cylinder quota.

Source-On Request