City gas companies describe growth in connections, a word that can mean a signed form, a pipe on a wall or a family cooking. Marketers should be paid, and boards informed, on the last of these.
Answering a pipeline leak in Jabalpur with facts and doorstep visits
On 14 September 2022 a contractor laying optical-fibre cable by horizontal drilling punctured one of our 125 mm polyethylene mains in a residential part of Jabalpur.
Utilities often treat safety communication as a compliance leaflet or a frightening advertisement. In a city new to piped gas it is the product's first lesson, best taught by a fitter in a kitchen and measured on the doorstep.
A discount persuades a factory owner to listen, not to convert. What converts an industrial cluster is a price formula the owner can check, a funded trial on his own furnace and a plain account of who receives gas first in a shortage.
Households cooking on our gas, March 2026
3.62 lakh
Counted only after sixty days of consumption; 41,000 in March 2021
Average gas sold a day, FY2025-26
0.92 MMSCMD
58 per cent CNG, 27 per cent industrial, 15 per cent homes and commercial kitchens
Colleagues in marketing, acquisition and customer service
164
Across seven geographical areas and the Pune head office
A city adopts piped gas one kitchen at a time, so I count the homes that cook on it, not the forms that promise to.
I am chief marketing officer of Indhanvi City Gas Limited, a fictional Pune-based city gas distributor with networks in seven geographical areas authorised by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board, across Vidarbha, eastern Madhya Pradesh and north Karnataka. We sold an average of 0.92 million standard cubic metres of gas a day in the year to March 2026, on revenue of ₹1,880 crore: 58 per cent as CNG for vehicles, 27 per cent to factories and the rest to homes and commercial kitchens. In March 2026, 3.62 lakh households cooked on our gas.
None of our cities had piped gas before we dug. Every customer I serve is switching from something already trusted: a cylinder brought by a familiar delivery man, a furnace-oil tank in a foundry yard, a petrol pump at the end of the road. My work is to make a new utility understood, safe and worth switching to. I learnt the ground for it over twenty-eight years: selling gas stoves to Vidarbha dealers, demonstrating water purifiers in district towns, pricing bulk LPG for Mumbai factories and running household and commercial gas for a listed Gujarat distributor, before joining Indhanvi in 2018.
The decision that shaped my approach came in our first city. In 2020 we stopped paying agencies for registration forms and began paying them only for homes still cooking on gas sixty days after connection. Registrations fell for two quarters; three agencies left. Our board now sees consuming households, not sign-ups, and every campaign I run is judged against it, and against whether families know what gas smells like and what to do then.
Paid for the flame, not the form
Paying agencies and contractors on gas-in and sixty days of consumption raised Amravati's gas-in conversion from 35 to 78 per cent and cut acquisition cost per consuming household from ₹31,400 to ₹21,800.
A leak answered with facts and visits
After a drilling contractor punctured a main in Jabalpur in 2022, fitters visited all 58,000 connected homes in seven weeks. 1,540 of 2,100 cancellation requests were withdrawn, and households able to name the smell, the valve and the emergency number rose from 41 to 83 per cent.
Foundries converted on a price they could check
A published two-part price, funded burner trials and a written curtailment protocol took Belagavi's industrial demand from 21,000 to 1,38,000 standard cubic metres a day by March 2026, across 71 foundry units.
Shorter queues before more stations
Deferring eight CNG stations in 2024 and spending ₹38 crore on supply to twelve congested ones cut their evening wait from 74 minutes to 19 and lifted their volume 31 per cent.
Current focus
I am preparing a board decision on marketing piped gas in the old city centres of Jabalpur and Amravati, where rented homes, narrow lanes and landlords' consent nearly double the cost of a connection. I am also rebuilding our industrial offer for Akola's food processors, who weigh us against biomass briquettes as well as LPG.
Conversations I welcome
I am not looking to leave Indhanvi. I would consider one independent directorship at a listed consumer-facing company outside gas and fuels, where customers must trust a product before they can use it safely, with about twenty-five days a year to give, subject to my board's consent and a conflicts review. I also speak occasionally to utility and governance audiences.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
Formation
Bachelor of Science in ChemistryWainganga College of Science · 1996
Master of Business Administration, marketingKanhan Institute of Management · 1998
Leela's quarterly paper to our committee leads with the households that failed the doorstep audit, not the ones that passed. After Jabalpur she put the cost of the safety visits and the registrations we would lose on the same page, and let us decide with both in view.
Sudhir KalwadeFictional independent director and chair of the Health, Safety and Environment Committee, Indhanvi City Gas LimitedThe full record ↗
Contact
I am not looking to leave Indhanvi. I would consider one independent directorship at a listed consumer-facing company outside gas and fuels, where customers must trust a product before they can use it safely, with about twenty-five days a year to give, subject to my board's consent and a conflicts review. I also speak occasionally to utility and governance audiences.
