NEW DELHI, MAY 4: On the busy thoroughfares of Kalindi Kunj in the south eastern fringes of Delhi, 149 fully loaded LPG tankers are parked within a 3 km radius of Prime Minister I K Gujral's Maharani Bagh house. They have been stranded there since April 15, waiting to be decanted at the LPG bottling plants of the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) at these centres. In north Delhi's Tikri Kalan, there are another 60 such tankers awaiting decanting. Usually it does not take more than two days for an 18-tonne tanker to be emptied. Forced to camp around their vehicles, the drivers are living on the banks of the Yamuna. They cook their food on stoves dangerously close to the highly inflammable gas in the tankers. They smoke their cigarettes squatting on the roads near the tankers, without a thought about the fire hazard they cause.

In Kalandi Kunj alone -- which can store up to a maximum of 300 tonnes at a time, the parked tankers aggregate around 2,700 tonnes. Senior fire officials of the Delhi Fire Service say they find the situation ``alarming''. They recall that about a decade ago in Shakur Basti, an LPG tanker blast killed three and injured people in the radius of 5 km. The central reason for the accumulation of the tankers is the lack of storage space in the IOC plants. According to IOC, the storage-crunch is because the number of tankers were increased for Northern India from 1,000 to 1,600, thus increasing the volume of LPG being brought in from filling stations. Also, there is a mid-year phenomenon of a fall in demand for LPG by 20 per cent.

Says a senior official of the LPG section of the IOC, ``The Central Government has decided that it will increase the LPG connections by 40 lakh this year. To facilitate this, the supply is also being increased. However, the units' bottling capacities have not been increased proportionally.'' Meanwhile, the transporters are angry with IOC for increasing the number of tankers without taking into account the available storage capacity. Tanker owners, mostly rehabilitated ex-Servicemen, say they lose about Rs 85,000 per vehicle per month when they are not running. Some drivers, they say, have even deserted their vehicles, frustrated by the long wait.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.