The Ministry for Petroleum and Natural Gas plans to approach the Union Cabinet to expand the reach of direct cash transfer of subsidy for domestic cooking gas customers to more districts.
Currently, Direct Benefit Transfer for LPG (DBTL), launched on June 1, covers 72 lakh consumers through 600 distributors in 19 districts across India.
“We will discuss with the Union Cabinet by August 9 on extending it to more districts. We will discuss what is doable and propose how many new districts we can cover,” said M. Veerappa Moily, Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas.
After blocking 65 lakh fake customers during the know-your-customer (KYC) exercise, LPG subsidy has been cut by Rs 2,000 crore.
The Government aims to save Rs 8,000-9,000 crore on LPG subsidy after the DBTL scheme is rolled out all over the country.
The Minister told mediapersons that within six weeks of launch of the Direct Benefit Transfer for LPG (DBTL), 2.28 million transactions have been recorded for 1.25 million domestic LPG connections accounting to Rs 91 crore.
“Such a large direct cash transfer programme may not have been taken up so far anywhere in the world,” Moily said.
On Tuesday, the scheme was reviewed by Moily and Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India.
“We have identified some challenges such as co-ordination between oil marketing companies and banks. We are hopeful to adhere to three months grace period to achieve them,” Moily said.
Underlining the major challenges ahead, the Minister said that there is a need to improve LPG seeding to reach at least 80 per cent from the current level of 65 per cent and bank seeding also to ramp up rapidly from the current level of 36 per cent to the same level by August 8.