One year of lockdown: Rising petrol, diesel prices fuelling common man's hardship and ire

Sukrity Mukherjee (53) is an unhappy homemaker. She lives in the southern fringes in Kolkata, runs her own small boutique and goes out on long trips on her two wheeler with a biker gang. The lockdown not only crippled her business but also snatched away from her the passion of making trips on her scooty.

“Times are difficult. The lockdown paralysed my business that I painstakingly nurtured over the past 20 years. It is so difficult to run the kitchen with runaway prices of vegetables and LPG cylinders.

Worse, petrol has become so expensive in the past one year that I was forced to discontinue the trips that provided an escape from the daily grind and were like oxygen to me,” rued Mukherjee.

“Earlier I could fill my fuel tank for under Rs 275. Now, filling up a small 5-litre tank costs more than Rs 450,” she said fondly running her fingers along the handle of the electric blue two-wheeler.

Mukherjee’s agony represents the nation’s angst around the price of petroleum products during the lockdown.

As jobs vanished, businesses shut down and incomes nosedived, the prices of petrol and diesel zoomed. So did the price of LPG cylinders that went through the roof.

In February 2020, the price of a litre of petrol moved past Rs 75. In June it breached the Rs 80 mark and by December went past Rs 90. In February, people were shocked to learn that in some towns of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh a litre of petrol was selling for more than Rs 100.

From the date of lockdown till March 20, 2021, the price of petrol rose 31.01% in the political capital of the country and 29.57% in the commercial capital.

But for the common man perhaps the worse blow came from the prices of diesel, the fuel on which every commodity moves in the country.

The price of diesel that was below Rs 70 a litre went past that mark in June and by December zoomed past the Rs 80 mark. It has stopped Rs 1.40 short of Rs 90 mark in Maharashtra and is about Rs 85 or past it in Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

Another spoiler of the common man’s budget is LPG. The price of LPG cylinders that was just below Rs 600 in May 2020 now stands above Rs 800, recording a rise of more than 33% in 9-10 months. The price of the domestic cylinder has risen by more than Rs 175 since December 2020.

While the clamour for reduction of prices is ringing loud in the campaign for the assembly polls in the five states, it does not seem to be a possibility in the near term.

The Centre has said that it needs the revenues – central excise constitutes 35-37% of the retail price of petrol and about 38% of that eta of diesel – to meet the increased expenditure to address the economic slowdown due to the pandemic.

The total tax component in the retail price of petrol is above 60% in India, making Indian fuel the most severely taxed item in the world.

The Union government has become so dependent on petro prices to earn revenues that in February 2021 Bank of American economists calculated that a reduction of Rs 5 a litre of petrol or diesel can slash the government’s income by Rs 71,760 crore.

“I am not interested in mathematical models. I don’t own a car. I am retired and survive on income from fixed deposits that are giving me less and less money every year,” said former school teacher Nirmala Banerjee (70).