Fuel crisis likely to reappear as stock going down

The shortage of fuel is likely to reappear in the country as the petroleum stock has gone below 14,000 kilolitres while the storage capacity is 72,000 kilolitres. The present stock is likely to be enough for couple of days.

Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) on Thursday informed that the stock of petroleum has been going down as it is unable to pay for the additional supply of the fuel from Indian Oil Corporation (IOC).

NOC also seek Rs. 5 billion from the government to replenish the stock of petroleum products. As the NOC has been incurring the loss of over one and a half billion rupee monthly, it is unable to import fuel, said acting managing director at NOC Suresh Kumar Agrawal.

Price adjustment is the only way to minimise NOC loss and ease fuel supply, said Agrawal, adding that that there should be automatic price adjustment mechanism in the petroleum products as per the price in the international market for the easy supply of fuel.

The state-oil monopoly has the total debt of Rs. 23.17 billion – government Rs 10.74 billion, Citizen Investment Trust Rs 4.13 billion, Employees Provident Fund Rs 6.40 billion, and Commercial Banks Rs 1.90 billion, according to NOC.

NOC has also demanded some Rs. 18 billion from the government to ease the supply of fuel in the next fiscal year. nepalnews.com