Dump petrol and gas on Valentine Day

Chances are that you may have seen that email already. ‘No-petrol day’ — has an amazingly simple logic — ‘if we don’t buy oil for a day, oil companies will choke on the supply’ and will be forced to cut petrol prices.

Well, before you forward it to five friends, here’s a secret. It won’t work.

Right now, the big worry for motorists in India is that petrol prices may go up, again. It is only a matter of time, feel experts, as the price of crude oil had shot past the $100/barrel mark last week. And higher price of raw materials do mean that the cost of end product also increases. The cause is political unrest in a distant land, but the pinch on the pocket would be immediate — talk of a connected world. But is it inevitable? The answer may surprise you.

“Almost 50-55 per cent of what you ipay for petrol in Mumbai is taxes,” says an official working with an oil company. Petrol price differs across cities because of changes in tax rates, but by and large, almost half of what you pay at the pump is taxes, he adds. Motorists in the US, where taxes are lower, pay just around `40/litre for petrol. Even consumers in Pakistan pay just `42/litre. There too, taxes on petrol are lower. So if the government was willing to forego some tax revenue, it could keep prices stable. But you should really thank your stars that you don’t live in Europe. Drivers in London pay more than `90/litre every time they want to tank up. Prices in Singapore are also a little more than price in India. In many of these countries, governments charge high taxes on fuel to push people towards using public transport. But in most Indian cities, efficient public transport is conspicuous by its absence.
This brings us back to the original premise. Is it possible to force oil companies/government to cut prices? The answer is No, short of reducing the global demand — which is impossible.

What you can do, however, is to cut back your own petrol consumption. It could be by car-pooling, moving to a more fuel efficient vehicle or even using public transport where feasible.