With the partial easing of the lockdown for essential manufacturing units , the State oil companies plan to immediately restart more than 500 projects cumulatively worth about Rs 43,000 crore.
The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas wants to capitalise on the government’s move to partly ease the ongoing nationwide lockdown and allow limited economic activity, the sources said. State oil companies have assessed that 511 projects can be started immediately.
These projects would require expenditure of Rs 42,790 crore in the current fiscal year. “These projects involving refinery, E&P, marketing infrastructure, pipelines and city gas distribution are expected to generate Rs 2,210 crore pay-out in the first month, out of which Rs 266 crore would be paid to labour,” according to the Ministry.
These projects will confirm to the Ministry of Home guidelines and manpower assessment has been done. However, there will be multiple challenges as many contractors who are involved in the project have been severely impacted in terms of liquidity thus impacting their execution ability.
The projects include 196 by Indian Oil Corp, 168 of Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd, 57 of Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd, 32 of Gail India Ltd and 26 of Oil and Natural Gas Corp Ltd.