LPG Price Surge Pushes Market Rate to Rs600 per Kg, More Than Double the Official OGRA Price

KARACHI: Winter has not even settled in yet, and the kitchen budget is already coming apart. The LPG price surge sweeping the country has taken market rates to between Rs500 and Rs600 per kilogram, while the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority’s notified price for October stands at Rs279.34. The cylinder that is cheap on paper costs more than twice as much at the shop.

The gap is starkest in the standard domestic cylinder. An 11.8kg cylinder should cost Rs3,296.23 at the official rate. In the market, the same cylinder is selling for Rs5,900 to Rs7,080. OGRA had raised the official price by Rs20.69 per kg for October, from Rs258.65 in September — the market has simply raced far past that increase.

Why prices have jumped

Irfan Khokhar, who chairs the LPG Distributors Association, links the spike to disrupted supplies after trade routes with Iran were closed, and to rising seasonal demand in the northern areas, where LPG is the main fuel for cooking and heating. Reports from across the country put sales at Rs500 to Rs600 per kg, he says, and prices could climb further in the coming days.

Khokhar was equally blunt about the regulator. Domestic refineries and gas fields meet most of the country’s LPG needs, he argues, so a notified price that nobody enforces points to weak oversight. He has demanded an immediate inquiry into what he describes as black-market sales worth billions of rupees. In Lahore, the Punjab Enforcement and Regulatory Authority has also failed to get shops to charge the official rate.

The burden falls hardest on homes where piped gas is either unavailable or too unreliable to cook on. For those families LPG is not a luxury. It is the daily necessity — and it is getting more expensive by the month.