Zee Media Bureau
New Delhi: With September 30 as the deadline to announce the new gas price, a four-member committee of secretaries (CoS) will meet with stakeholders on Monday to review that gas-pricing formula.
Set up by the government, this will be the panel's first meeting with the stakeholders and they have been asked to submit their report in two or three weeks.
"A committee has been formed with secretaries of the power and fertilizer ministries as well as the expenditure department as members. Additional secretary in the petroleum ministry Rajive Kumar will be the member-secretary," a petroleum ministry source is reported to have said.
The petroleum ministry has called representatives of both producers and consumers Monday to discuss the issue, he added.
According to report, the panel will examine the whole range of issues related to gas pricing, including the Rangarajan formula, which was approved by the previous UPA government, but could not be implemented ever since the Election Commission barred it from announcing the price in the period leading up to polling.
A new price based on the Rangarajan formula would have most likely doubled the gas price to USD 8.4 per unit from April 1.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had on June 25 decided to defer implementation of the Rangarajan formula till Sep 30 and come up with a new regime by Oct 1.
RIL and its partners BP Niko Resources have served an arbitration notice on the government on revising their gas price, which expired on March 31 this year.
On the other hand, the ministry has imposed a penalty on the company for failing to meet output targets from RIL`s D-1 and D-3 fields in the KG-D6 eastern offshore block to the extent of 1.9 trillion cubic feet of gas.
The new government has decided to defer the implementation till September-end to hold wider consultations with various stakeholders.
With Agency Inputs
