MUMBAI: Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) president Sumit Mazumder has appealed to the body’s members to pledge to give up their LPG subsidies.
The ‘Give It Up’ campaign is a novel way to strike at the conscience of the citizens.’The ‘Give It Up’ campaign is a novel way to strike the conscience of the citizens. He appealed ‘ I appeal to CII members to pledge to give up their LPG subsidies” while speaking at the CII National Council meeting held at Mumbai Recently.
He also asserted that CII is committed to playing a key role for a more inclusive and equitable society and are happy to partner with government for such initiatives. The new government has been working towards effective targeting of subsidies and welfare measures for the benefit of the economically weaker sections.
As a step in this direction, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas Launched the scheme ‘PAHAL’ on 15 November 2014 encompassing more than 150 million consumers spread across 676 districts of India, under which the LPG customers get subsidy directly transferred to their respective bank accounts.
After PM Narendra Modi appealed to the citizens to give up their LPG subsidies on a voluntary basis under the ‘Give It Up’ campaign for the benefit of the poor families, around 6.5 lakh consumers complied resulting in savings of about Rs. 300 crore.
Addressing CIIs National Council, S Varadarajan, Chairman, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) said “Close to 150 million households use LPG as the cooking medium and the subsidy mechanism followed earlier had a dual pricing in the market. To address this issue and target subsidies effectively, the government introduced the direct benefit transfer”
According to the CII release Varadarajan mentioned that the PAHAL scheme was hugely successful with direct benefit transfers benefiting close to 130 million households, who received the subsidy transfers in their bank accounts in the span of 100 days. Within four months, the scheme had 86% of customer population covered totaling to 135 million households.
“The long-term vision under PAHAL is to provide the benefit of the received subsidy to 130 million rural households which do not have access to LPG which is a cleaner medium for cooking.” said Varadarajan.
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