India meet on fuel crisis

Restaurant owners in Bengaluru are gathering on Monday, April 13, to confront a cooking-gas shortage that has already disrupted kitchens across Karnataka. (hospitality.economictimes.indiatimes.com) The National Restaurant Association of India’s Bengaluru chapter said the meeting will be held at Skydeck by Sherlocks and will bring together restaurateurs, Bharat Petroleum Corporation, Indian Oil Corporation and GAIL. The agenda includes the liquefied petroleum gas supply crunch and alternate fuels for food-and-beverage operations. (hospitality.economictimes.indiatimes.com) The trade group said GAIL executive Sanjay Kumar Singh will lead a session on piped natural gas, including infrastructure readiness and adoption problems. The event will also feature electric kitchen equipment, coal-based systems, biogas, firewood technologies and what organizers described as artificial-intelligence-led liquefied-petroleum-gas-free kitchen operations. (hospitality.economictimes.indiatimes.com) The meeting follows a month of supply cuts that hit restaurants first and hardest. On March 14, Karnataka food and civil supplies minister K. H. Muniyappa said the state could not supply commercial cylinders to hotels for the next seven to 10 days because oil companies had limited stock. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) By that point, at least 30% of hotels across Karnataka had shut and 50% of small eateries in Bengaluru had suspended or trimmed operations, according to The Times of India. Muniyappa said two carriers had arrived while 10 to 12 vessels were still held up, delaying supplies. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) The National Restaurant Association of India had already told members on March 10 to cut fuel use. Its advisory asked restaurants to trim menus, pause dishes that need long simmering or deep frying, turn off pilot flames when idle and shift some cooking to induction stoves, electric fryers, ovens, rice cookers and steamers. (business-standard.com) The dispute also moved into court. On March 17, the Karnataka High Court asked the state and central governments to disclose commercial cylinder stocks after the Bangalore Hotels’ Association challenged a state order that limited hotel, dhaba and canteen supply to 1,000 cylinders a day. (thehindu.com) Court filings cited in The Hindu said Karnataka had distributed about 44,000 commercial cylinders a day before the crisis began, and that Bengaluru alone has about 40,000 hotels employing more than 600,000 people. The same report said a March 9 natural-gas supply order required city gas distributors to provide industrial and commercial consumers 80% of their six-month average consumption, subject to availability. (thehindu.com) The restaurant body says it represents more than 500,000 restaurants nationwide, which helps explain why a Bengaluru chapter meeting has drawn public-sector fuel companies into the room. Monday’s session is set up less as a conference than as an operating plan for kitchens trying to stay open with less gas. (nrai.org, hospitality.economictimes.indiatimes.com)