Editorial: Petro-Hike Lessons to Prepare in Time

The new price of petrol in Sikkim will be known only after the Food & Civil Supplies Department issues the required notice sometime on Thursday. The Centre, which has been hinting at a hike for more than a week now, has gone ahead with a record increase in petrol prices, raising the per litre price by an unprecedented Rs. 6.28. Add the VAT and Cess components to it and one is staring at a hike which is bound to pinch everyone. Even as petrol car owners start calculating what the hike does to their monthly budgets, everyone else can rest assured that soon there will be a demand from taxi operators to have the fare charts reworked as well. This is a substantial hike and logic prescribes that fares for taxis operating on petrol get a relook as well. Even as this supplementary hike is processed, it is important that planners in Sikkim start exploring some long term options. The latest hike in petrol prices is a record-breaking leap, but those who follow the news will recall that every hike in the past few years has been a record increase. Fuel prices do not look likely to stabilise in the near future, and the coming months will undoubtedly see a hike in diesel prices and next will come a hike in LPG prices. While individually, these hikes might mean little, collectively, they will put household budgets under tremendous stress. Budgeting, something that pressures only middle class families, will soon start encroaching into even upper middleclass homes and when that happens, Sikkim will realise how little has been done to address such issues. For example, most people still don’t mind the diversion of subsidised domestic LPG into commercial kitchens; but once the price rises too sharply, and the black rates, which many homes pay out without complaint at present, become too usurious, the people will protest. Instead of getting wrong-footed when that happens, it would be advisable to have the system reworked in advance and the existing anomaly corrected. The other public utility which continues to remain overlooked in Sikkim is public transport. Tourist season is already making share-cabs rare, and once even the share-cab fares become too high, commuters who use this service to get to work and back will grow resentful. Sikkim is desperate need of an affordable public transport system and the latest petrol price hike offers a good opportunity to start planning one. The hike is so substantial that the government should also be considering fresh guidelines for POL usage because the final bill in the new rates have potential to unsettle even the most extravagant projections. Sikkim has no control over how inflation marches in the country or how the petro-price graph progresses, so it should do the next best thing – start planning now to minimise the impact.