Teach the smell before you sell the pipe

Every city gas company communicates about safety, and most do it in one of two ways. The first is the compliance leaflet: a folded sheet handed over at connection, listing dos and don'ts in small type, filed in a kitchen drawer and never read again. The second is the alarming advertisement: a burning kitchen, a stern voice and a helpline number flashing at the end. I have commissioned both. I now think neither works in cities that have never had piped gas, and that safety should be treated as the first thing we sell rather than the last thing we disclose.

The reason is that a new utility is judged, before anything else, by whether people feel safe living with it. Our customers have cooked on LPG for years. They know the cylinder, the regulator and the smell of a leak, and many of them, like my mother in Nagpur, have a ritual for checking it. Piped gas asks them to exchange a hazard they understand for one they do not. If our communication leaves them frightened, they will not switch. If it leaves them unconcerned, they will not know what to do on the one evening it matters.

Fear is a poor teacher

Frightening advertising produces recall. People remember the burning kitchen. What they rarely remember is the action that would have prevented it. When we tested an early safety film in two towns in 2020, recall of the film was high, and the share of viewers who could name the right first step in a leak was no better than in a town where it had not run. Several viewers told our researchers they had concluded that piped gas was more dangerous than a cylinder. That belief is unsupported, and it is precisely the belief that stops a city adopting the fuel.

Fear also travels faster than any operator. In September 2022 a contractor drilling for cable punctured one of our mains in Jabalpur. Nobody was hurt and the section was isolated in 38 minutes, but a video of fire engines spread through local messaging groups with the claim that every kitchen pipe could explode. Two thousand households asked to cancel within a week. No advertisement could have answered that video. What answered it was a person at the door.

The fitter is the medium

Gas in a city network is odourised so that a leak can be smelt, and the safe response is short: shut the meter valve, open the windows, do not touch switches or light a flame, and call the emergency line from outside. Those four actions take three minutes to teach. They are best taught in the household's own kitchen, by the person who installed the pipe, with a family member's hand on the family's own valve.

We therefore treat the fitter's gas-in visit as our most important piece of communication. Fitters are trained to demonstrate the four actions, to let a family member turn the meter valve, and to leave a sticker with the emergency number inside a kitchen cupboard door rather than on the meter, which few people look at. We repeat the demonstration on an annual safety visit, which also checks the rubber hose to the stove and the condition of the internal piping. After Jabalpur we visited all 58,000 connected homes in that city in seven weeks. The visits cost ₹3.8 crore and are now part of our service everywhere.

The same logic applies to the larger public risk, which is damage by others. Most incidents on city networks begin with someone digging: a drainage contractor, a road crew, a cable layer drilling blind. Advertising to the general public does little here. We work instead with municipal engineers and the contractors who dig most often, giving them maps, a single number to call before digging and a standby team that will mark our lines on the ground. Reported third-party damage across our network fell from 31 incidents in 2022–23 to 12 in 2025–26. My operations colleagues own the engineering. Marketing owns the habit.

Measure what a household can do

If safety communication is to be managed like a product, it needs a measure of outcome, and advertising recall is not one. We use a doorstep audit. A researcher visits a random sample of connected homes and asks a family member to show, not tell, what they would do if they smelt gas. A household passes if it can identify the smell, find and operate the meter valve and produce the emergency number. In Jabalpur before the 2022 visits, 41 per cent passed; afterwards, 83 per cent did. Across our seven areas, 79 per cent passed in 2025–26, and the Health, Safety and Environment Committee of our board sees the results every quarter, area by area.

The audit also shows where communication is failing. Rented homes pass less often than owned ones, because tenants change and nobody shows the newcomer the valve. Households where the person who cooks was out during gas-in pass less often too. Fitters now schedule gas-in when the main cook is at home, and we send a refresher visit when a property changes hands or tenants.

We audit our own staff in the same way. Every quarter, contact-centre agents are tested on whether they give a caller who reports a smell the same four instructions, in the same order, before taking any details. In our first audit, in 2023, only 64 per cent did. A household that has learnt the right steps and then hears different ones on the telephone will reasonably conclude that nobody really knows.

This approach has limits. Doorstep visits are expensive compared with advertising, and a young company under pressure to grow will be tempted to cut them first. Audits measure the households we can reach, not those that refuse a visit. And no amount of household education reduces the operator's duty to build and maintain its network to the regulator's technical and safety standards, which is engineering work that marketing must never claim as its own.

But the core of the argument holds. People adopt a utility they know how to live with. The most persuasive thing a city gas company can say about safety is a demonstration that a family can repeat by itself, years later, without having to remember an advertisement.