Kerosene dealers as well as officials of the District Supply Department deny any supply-side shortage. They say that the onset of winter, when the use of fuel goes up, was the main reason for the scarcity, besides the approaching Diwali festival. District Supply Officer D G Khachar said that unlike wheat and sugar, kerosene supply to the outlets was on daily basis because the outlet operators' storage capacity was very small.

According to him, no kerosene dealer in Vadodara had a capacity to store more than 2000 litres, and this low storage capacity was, in fact, the main reason for long queues outside the outlets. 2,000 litres is enough for 200 ration card holders at a rate of 10 litres per family.

The total monthly allotment of kerosene for the city and district is 6,500 kilolitres. When it was pointed out that quota allotment was less than the requirement because there were about seven lakh ration card holders, Khachar said that as many as 1.20 lakh card holders have LPG connections and are not given kerosene. Hence, the kerosene allocation to the district was much more than required. ``There is always a surplus of 120 kilolitres of kerosene with us'', Khachar claimed.

He said that though there were about 2.5 lakh bottled LPG connection holders and 50,000 pipeline LPG consumers in the city, all of them had not disclosed it to the supply department. Had it been done, the requirement of kerosene would go down drastically, he stated. He said it was very difficult to detect the gas connection holders.