Fuel Station
File photo of fuel pump | Manisha Mondal | ThePrint
Text Size:

New Delhi: For a glimpse into the impact of rolling lockdowns and sputtering factory sales on Asia’s second-biggest oil importer, look no further than India’s fuel purchasing patterns.

The sale of diesel — the country’s most-used fuel and a proxy for its economic health — slumped 20% in the first half of August from the same period in July, according to people familiar with preliminary data from the country’s three biggest fuel retails. Sales were down almost a quarter from a year earlier, more evidence that India’s economic recovery from Covid-19 is stalling or going backwards.

If trends observed in the first 15 days extend to all of August, that would translate to a second monthly decline in diesel sales following an initial rebound when India started to emerge from the world’s biggest national lockdown of 1.3 billion people in May. While heavy rains tend to weigh on diesel demand during this time of year, the sharper-than-normal drop is also being driven by localized lockdowns in some of India’s most-industrialized states.

Based on the data, sales of diesel, jet fuel and liquefied petroleum gas dropped from July and also fell from year-earlier levels. Gasoline eked out a small gain as commuters opted for private transport over crowded buses and trains.

It remains to be seen if the plunge in demand for diesel, a fuel used to power on-site generators found in factories and farms, is a forewarning of an economic contraction and a continuation of the slump in factory output, which fell for a fourth month in June.

Indian refiner Bharat Petroleum Corp. offered 75,000 tons of diesel for loading this month as processors resort to shipping domestically-made cargoes abroad in efforts to cope with the oversupply and high inventories.

 

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube & Telegram

News media is in a crisis & only you can fix it

You are reading this because you value good, intelligent and objective journalism. We thank you for your time and your trust.

You also know that the news media is facing an unprecedented crisis. It is likely that you are also hearing of the brutal layoffs and pay-cuts hitting the industry. There are many reasons why the media’s economics is broken. But a big one is that good people are not yet paying enough for good journalism.

We have a newsroom filled with talented young reporters. We also have the country’s most robust editing and fact-checking team, finest news photographers and video professionals. We are building India’s most ambitious and energetic news platform. And we aren’t even three yet.

At ThePrint, we invest in quality journalists. We pay them fairly and on time even in this difficult period. As you may have noticed, we do not flinch from spending whatever it takes to make sure our reporters reach where the story is. Our stellar coronavirus coverage is a good example. You can check some of it here.

This comes with a sizable cost. For us to continue bringing quality journalism, we need readers like you to pay for it. Because the advertising market is broken too.

If you think we deserve your support, do join us in this endeavour to strengthen fair, free, courageous, and questioning journalism, please click on the link below. Your support will define our journalism, and ThePrint’s future. It will take just a few seconds of your time.

Support Our Journalism