KARACHI: Deregulation of compressed natural gas (CNG) in the last week of December 2016 has provided a free hand to CNG dealers to play havoc with prices, as they have increased the price to Rs75 from Rs74 per kg in Karachi, while those who were selling at Rs73 are now charging Rs74 per kg, it emerged on Thursday.

This is the fourth increase in price since the deregulation of CNG in December 2016 when gas was available at Rs67.50 per kg.

Previously, they had raised the prices due to Rs2.18 rise in gas tariff in the middle of December.

Besides increasing the price, many dealers do not have digital meters at the CNG stations as their employees take one to two rupees per kg extra from motorists by manually stopping the meters. Many people complain that when they ask the dealers to fill gas for Rs300, they deliberately stop the meter at Rs298 or Rs299 but charge them Rs300. This practice has also been in vogue at those CNG outlets where dealers fill gas via digital meters.

Chairman of the All Pakistan CNG Association Sindh Zone Shabbir Sulemanji said the price of CNG in Sindh ranged between Rs73 and Rs75 per kg under a deregulated regime.

According to him, the cost of gas has risen to Rs37 per kg from Rs32 per kg during the past three to four months. After adding cost of gas and taxes/duties, the price of gas has soared to Rs61 from Rs55 per kg in the past three to four months. Besides, the rate of electricity charged by K-Electric for CNG dealers was the highest as compared to other parts of the country, he said. After adding various expenses, power bill, labour charges etc, gas price came to around Rs72 per kg, he added.

Despite increase in prices, he said, CNG still cost Rs24 to Rs25 per litre less than petrol.

Consumer rights activists have urged the government to withdraw the recent increase in CNG price to ease burden on consumers and take control of pricing mechanism of CNG prices under its authority.

They say price fixation should be the government’s responsibility and a mechanism for CNG prices should be assigned to a government authority. The government had allowed CNG station owners to fix prices as per its cost but they were exploiting this authority by increasing its price very frequently.

Consumers spent millions of rupees to convert their petrol-driven vehicles to run on CNG in order to save fuel expenses but they were not getting this benefit anymore.

Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2017