Decisions that slowed the count and grew the business

Paying for the flame instead of the form in Amravati

We opened our first domestic network in Amravati in October 2019. Like every authorised entity, we had licence commitments to connect a large number of homes within a fixed period, and our first plan rewarded speed. Seven agencies ran registration camps and were paid ₹250 for each completed form. By March 2020 we held 62,000 registrations. Only 21,700 homes had gas flowing, and only about 15,100 of those used more than five standard cubic metres a month. The rest had a meter on the wall and a cylinder still on the stove.

The stakes ran beyond one city. A registration that never became a consuming home cost us between ₹4,000 and ₹17,500, depending on how far installation had gone. When lockdown halted work in 2020, I proposed a different contract: nothing for forms; ₹900 to an agency for each household still consuming sixty days after gas-in; installation contractors paid on gas-in within forty-five days of registration; and ₹1,000 at registration, with the rest of the connection charge spread over twelve bi-monthly bills.

Our head of projects disagreed. His team reported progress against licence commitments, and he expected the change to slow the count he was measured on. The fund's nominee director asked what penalty exposure we were accepting. We agreed that projects would keep reporting licence progress on the regulator's definitions while the board pack led with consuming households.

Registrations fell from about 5,200 a month to 3,100 for two quarters. Three of the seven agencies left, and deferred connection charges added ₹14 crore to our balance sheet by March 2022.

By 2022–23, 78 per cent of registered Amravati homes were gassed in within ninety days, against about 35 per cent within six months under the old contract, and 91 per cent of gassed-in homes were still consuming after sixty days, against 70 per cent. All-in acquisition cost per consuming household fell from ₹31,400 to ₹21,800. Amravati reached 96,000 consuming households by March 2026, and the contract became our standard in every area.

What I would do differently: I designed the change with finance and the agencies but not with the projects team, whose contractors absorbed the rework. I would also have secured meter stock first. For two months, homes waited for meters that agencies had been paid to hurry.

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. Our emergency team isolated the section in 38 minutes. Nobody was hurt, but 640 homes were without gas for nineteen hours. By evening a video of fire engines and hissing gas was circulating on local messaging groups, with the claim that the pipe in every kitchen could explode. Within a week 2,100 customers had asked to cancel registrations or disconnect, and eleven housing societies withdrew permission for riser work.

Jabalpur was our second-largest domestic market, with 58,000 connected homes, and the festive season, when families most often change their kitchens, was a fortnight away. I proposed four steps: a plain public account within twenty-four hours, with the timeline of the incident; an open day at our control room for journalists and residents' associations; a safety visit by a trained fitter to every connected home in the city; and a six-week pause in acquisition advertising, including the festive campaign.

Our legal counsel feared that a detailed statement could prejudice our claim against the drilling contractor. Our head of sales argued that pausing the festive campaign would give away the best weeks of the year. The managing director supported the plan on two conditions: the statement would describe what happened without assigning blame, and the claim would be pursued separately.

The visits took seven weeks and cost ₹3.8 crore, and we estimate that about 9,000 registrations slipped into the following year. In exchange, 1,540 of the 2,100 cancellation requests were withdrawn, nine of the eleven societies restored permission within ten weeks, and the share of audited households able to name the smell, the meter valve and the emergency number rose from 41 to 83 per cent. With operations we then began a call-before-you-dig programme with the municipal corporation and cable contractors. Reported third-party damage across our network fell from 31 incidents in 2022–23 to 12 in 2025–26.

Annual safety visits are now standard in every area.

What I would do differently: we lost ten hours agreeing the first statement with legal counsel. I would settle an incident communication protocol before any incident, and I would meet the residents' associations in person before speaking to the press.

Selling gas to the Belagavi foundries on a formula they could check

Our steel pipeline reached the industrial estates on Belagavi's southern edge in 2022. About 180 foundries and machine shops work there, firing ladle preheaters, heat-treatment furnaces and core ovens on furnace oil, light diesel oil or LPG. In the first year nine units converted. When I took over industrial business development in April 2023, owners told me why. Fuel suppliers had changed prices on them without notice, they expected us to cut their gas whenever it was short, and converting burners would cost them between ₹8 lakh and ₹40 lakh a unit.

A mid-sized foundry can use as much gas as 8,000 homes. Our commercial head proposed a flat price 8 per cent below delivered LPG, revised at our discretion. Our chief financial officer wanted take-or-pay at 85 per cent of contracted quantity from the first month. I proposed a two-part price instead: our weighted gas cost, with its components shown, plus a fixed margin per standard cubic metre, reset quarterly with thirty days' notice. We would fund a trial on one furnace per unit, up to ₹6 lakh, with a combustion engineering partner; set take-or-pay at 60 per cent in the first year, rising to 80; and give every customer a written protocol explaining that homes and CNG stations are supplied first in a shortage.

We gave up the freedom to reprice each month, committed ₹4.2 crore to trials and accepted volume risk if converted units drew less than planned. Our chief executive approved the package for Belagavi alone, with a review after a year.

By March 2026, 97 units had run trials and 62 had signed, bringing the cluster to 71 converted units and its industrial demand from 21,000 to 1,38,000 standard cubic metres a day. The formula also worked against us: when imported gas costs rose in early 2025 it passed the increase through as written, and two units went back to LPG for a quarter.

The formula is now standard in every area, with a quarterly price letter to each customer.

What I would do differently: the first contracts explained curtailment in a clause, not a conversation. When upstream maintenance forced a thirty-hour curtailment in September 2024, six owners felt misled. I would explain priority in person at signing, and bring an energy auditor in before the trial rather than after it.

Shortening CNG queues before opening more stations

By early 2024 we had 158 CNG stations. In Jabalpur, Sagar and Akola many were daughter booster stations, supplied by trucks carrying cascades from mother stations on the pipeline. On weekday evenings the twelve busiest had average waits of 74 minutes, and auto-rickshaw drivers, our most vocal customers, had begun telling each other that CNG was unreliable. Two dealers had given up their stations in 2023. Dealers were paid only per kilogram sold, so a station that ran short of gas paid its dealer nothing for staying open.

Our licence commitments included a number of stations, and the 2024–25 plan added eight more daughter stations. I argued that new stations fed by the same strained cascades would spread the queue rather than shorten it. I proposed deferring the eight; redirecting ₹38 crore to connect five congested stations to the pipeline and add compression and storage at seven others; paying dealers a fixed monthly amount linked to metered uptime as well as commission per kilogram; and publishing estimated queue times in our app.

Our head of projects objected because deferral slowed progress on station commitments, and our chief financial officer preferred the volume that new stations would bring. The fund's nominee director asked for an analysis of our licence exposure before the board decided. The board approved the plan on condition that the deferred stations opened in 2025–26.

The first surprise came from our own data. Dealers had reported uptime of about 96 per cent; dispenser meters showed 81. Publishing queue times embarrassed three dealers whose stations looked worse than their reports, and their association complained to our managing director.

By March 2025 the average evening wait at the twelve stations had fallen to 19 minutes and their volume had risen by 31 per cent. No dealer left us in 2024–25 or 2025–26. The eight deferred stations opened in 2025–26 alongside six others, taking the network to 172, on sites chosen from queue data rather than from landowners' offers.

Station decisions now begin with supply capacity and measured waiting time, and only then with location.

What I would do differently: I would have shown the dealers' association the meter data privately before publishing queue times, and given dealers a quarter to fix what the meters revealed. Public measurement works better when people have had a fair chance to improve first.