What a city gas marketer has to know well

Our customers do not lack cooking fuel. They have a cylinder, a delivery routine and often a spare, so piped gas has to be worth drilling a wall, obtaining a landlord's consent and paying a charge. I build acquisition around the moments when switching is easiest: a housing society's first gas-in evening, when neighbours can watch a meter turn; the week a family's cylinder runs out; the month a new building receives its occupancy certificate. We replaced a ₹6,000 upfront payment with ₹1,000 at registration and the balance spread over twelve bi-monthly bills, which now carries about ₹31 crore of deferred connection charges on our balance sheet. Every offer is judged by one outcome: a household still cooking on our gas sixty days after connection. In Amravati that share rose from 70 to 91 per cent of gassed-in homes once agencies were paid on it. Old city centres remain the hardest ground, because rented homes and narrow lanes nearly double the cost of each connection.

Natural gas in a city network is odourised so that a leak can be smelt, and the most useful thing a household can learn is what that smell means: shut the meter valve, open the windows, avoid switches and flames, and call our emergency line from outside. Fitters teach those four actions at gas-in, in the kitchen, and repeat them on an annual safety visit. I measure the result through doorstep audits rather than advertising recall; across our seven areas, 79 per cent of audited households could carry out all four actions in 2025–26. The larger public risk is damage by others, mostly contractors digging for cables, drains and roads. With our operations team I run a call-before-you-dig programme for municipal engineers and the contractors who dig most often, and reported third-party damage fell from 31 incidents in 2022–23 to 12 in 2025–26. Engineering standards belong to our qualified operations and safety leaders. My part is to make the public side of the system work.

A factory owner weighs piped gas against furnace oil, light diesel oil, LPG or, in food processing, biomass briquettes, and judges it by the fuel cost of a good casting or a finished batch rather than by a price per unit of heat. Industrial business development has reported to me since April 2023. We sell on a two-part price that a customer can check: our weighted gas cost, with its components shown, plus a fixed margin per standard cubic metre, reset quarterly with thirty days' notice. We fund a burner trial on one furnace before a contract, with a combustion engineering partner, and our engineers explain in person, at signing, that homes and CNG stations are supplied first when gas is short. Industrial demand across our areas averaged 2,48,000 standard cubic metres a day in 2025–26, 27 per cent of our sales. Our 2,940 commercial kitchens follow the same logic at a smaller scale: a hotel owner wants proof that the tandoor still cooks properly on gas.

CNG is 58 per cent of our volume and the part of our business most visible on the street. Our 172 stations are of three kinds: 52 we own and operate, 84 owned and run by dealers, and 36 on the forecourts of fuel retailers. Stations away from the pipeline are daughter booster stations, supplied by trucks carrying cascades from mother stations, and their capacity depends on how fast those cascades arrive. An auto-rickshaw driver who waits ninety minutes loses an evening's fares and loses faith in the fuel faster than any campaign can restore it. I manage dealer economics as a marketing question. A dealer paid only per kilogram earns nothing when gas runs short, so since 2024 we have paid a fixed monthly amount linked to metered uptime as well as commission per kilogram. We publish estimated queue times in our app and use them to decide where supply investment goes before deciding where the next station opens.

A city gas company can describe the same household as a registration, an installation, a gassed-in connection or a consuming customer, and growth looks very different under each label. Our board pack shows all four for every area, with consuming households as the headline: homes using at least five standard cubic metres a month after sixty days. For campaigns we use holdout towns, matched areas where a campaign does not run, so that we can separate its effect from season and word of mouth. In 2024 a ₹4.6 crore television and outdoor campaign in Jabalpur produced no measurable lift against its holdout. I reported it to the board as a failure and moved the money to society demonstrations. Licence commitments are reported by our projects and regulatory teams on the regulator's own definitions, and nobody in my team edits those reports. I keep that reporting and our management measures side by side, so that the difference between them never surprises a director.