The government is not considering any proposal to bifurcate state-owned gas utility GAIL (India) Ltd, and the company is focused on building pipelines to connect gas sources to consumers to accelerate gas usage, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Monday.
GAIL is India’s biggest natural gas marketing and trading firm and owns 60 per cent of the country’s 26,284-km gas pipeline network, giving it a stranglehold on the market.
To resolve the conflict of a transporter also being the marketer, it was proposed that GAIL’s pipeline business should be hived off into a separate entity. But the proposal has been dropped for now.
