Oil Minister rules out cut in fuel prices

New Delhi: Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri said on Wednesday that there was no proposal to cut petrol and diesel prices at present as there was “high volatility” in global crude oil prices.

The minister dismissed media reports about a fuel price cut as ‘speculative’, saying the government’s top priority is energy availability.

He also said that the oil marketing companies — Indian Oil, BPCL and HPCL, incurred heavy losses when the prices of crude oil had skyrocketed recently.

There are no discussions with oil marketing companies on fuel price cuts and they want a stable and positive forward-looking situation in terms of pricing, the minister added.

The minister pointed out that India was the only country where fuel prices had come down in recent months.

“In the South Asian countries, the prices of petrol and diesel increased by around 40-80 per cent. If you look at the Western industrialized world, the prices have gone up there, but in India prices have come down,” Puri said.

“We are able to do it because of far-sighted and visionary leadership. Central excise duty reduction was done on two occasions, November 2021, and May 2022 and we carried that into 2023,” he added.