Capitals of North eastern states to be connected with National Gas Grid, cooking gas pipeline in Guwahati to be a reality soon

The CMD (Chairman cum Managing Director) of Oil India Ltd (OIL) Utpal Bora on Saturday here announced that Guwahati and state capitals of other North Eastern states would be connected with the National Gas Grid.

"A joint venture (JV) has already been signed for the project. OIL is one of the players in the JV. The implementation of this project will take around three years", said Bora. The other state owned firms in the JV is GAIL, Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL)-Numaligarh Refinery and IOCL.

Bora said work for the gas pipeline from Barauni to Guwahati has already started. He added that, under the project for Northeastern states, 1500 km of pipeline will be built, with a cost of Rs 6,000 Crore. Bora added that the once completed the project would benefit the NE region in multiple ways. He informed that the OIL also plans to set up some CNG stations in Guwahati which will help tackle the pollution in and around the city.

As per the plan, households in Guwahati metro areas would get piped gas connection first and later other big towns of the states would be connected with piped gas.

To connect all state capitals of Northeastern states with national gas grid by pipeline is under the ambitious project– the Urja Ganga project of Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. In the eastern India, the three other important centres are Haldia, Paradip, and Barauni.

On OIL's performance in last financial year, the state owned firm has recorded an impressive growth of 72.27 percent terms of production in the 2017-18 with a turnover of Rs 2,667.93 crore compared to 2016-17 which was Rs 1,548.68 crore.