Starting Monday, five cities will see petrol and diesel being sold under a daily price change regime. These are Puducherry, Visakhapatnam, Udaipur, Jamshedpur and Chandigarh.
Technological innovations like price push will help oil companies change the price at midnight at more than 100 outlets. An executive with Indian Oil Corporation said prices would change at the back-end in 43 of its outlets in these cities. “For the remaining, the dealers will have to do it themselves,” he said.
Prices will be conveyed to dealers a day before at 8.30 pm. Adequate information on prices will be provided to consumers through press releases.
“We will continue to take the 15-day average, but it will change every day in these cities. The days will be calculated skipping the previous two days in order to make the pricing more precise,” the IndianOil executive said.
Till now, diesel and petrol prices are changed on the 1st and 16th of every month based on the average prices of the previous fortnight.
“The oil companies have installed the hardware and software needed for daily updates at our outlets. It will be an automated technology connected to V-Sat. If it fails, we are asked to display prices manually,” said Arjun Singh, president of the Chandigarh Petroleum Dealers Association.
Chandigarh has 41 retail outlets and dealers here are worried that daily pricing could lower profitability. “Mohali and Panchkula are inter-linked to Chandigarh and pumps there will now lose market to nearby cities if prices are high,” said Ajay Bansal, president of the All India Petroleum Dealers Association.
Dealers also said the rest of India would become aware about upcoming prices from the price flow in these five cities.
Singh added under fortnightly pricing, dealers took maximum and minimum stocks depending on prices, which would not be possible now.
State-owned IndianOil, Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation own over 95 per cent of nearly 58,000 petrol pumps in the country.