The Oil Ministry has moved a cabinet note seeking approval for hiving off state-owned gas utility GAIL (India) Ltd’s pipeline business into a separate entity for a possible sale to a strategic investor at a later date, Livemint reports.
GAIL is India’s biggest natural gas marketing and trading firm and owns more than 70 per cent of the country’s 16,981-km pipeline network, giving it a stranglehold on the market. Users of natural gas have often complained about not ‘fairly’ getting access to GAIL’s 12,160-km pipeline network to transport their fuel.
Sources said to resolve the conflict arising out of the same entity owning the two jobs, bifurcating GAIL is being considered. GAIL’s core business after the bifurcation would be the marketing of natural gas and petrochemical production. It will have to hire capacity on pipelines from the subsidiary and pay regulator approved traffics for the same.
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