(ET)
India is working on plans to enable gas utility GAIL to keep its marketing and pipeline operations separate without breaking up the company, India’s oil minister said on Thursday.
The government had said in January that it wanted to split the company into two – one for laying pipelines and the other for marketing and petrochemicals – to encourage more transparency between the two operations. “My job is not to create more companies, my job is to create more accessibility through policy,” Dharmendra Pradhan, India’s oil minister said on Thursday.
GAIL (India) Ltd is the country’s biggest gas marketing and trading firm and owns most of the nation’s pipelines, giving it a dominant position in the country’s energy market. Investors, private companies and consultants have said that GAIL’s dominance in pipeline infrastructure across the country conflicts with its business of marketing and trading of natural gas.
