Sita Karki, a housewife from Gaushala, was forced to return home with the empty cooking gas cylinder she had brought along on Saturday after being in queue for six hours in front of Royal Kantipur Gas Centre in mid-Baneshwor.

“I was informed that the gas depot will distribute half-filled liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) on Saturday. So, I rushed to the depot with my empty cylinder early in the morning,” she said.

“But having waited in queue almost for a day, the depot informed us that cylinders will not arrive today,” the frustrated homemaker added.

Sagar Rana, a job holder from Sano Gaucharan, has endured a similar situation. “It has been two weeks since my two cylinders ran out of gas. I don’t have fuel to cook my meal.”

Rana said that he had been cooking meal in oven, but there is shortage of firewoods too. “Not only woods, induction cookers, rice cookers and heaters are out of stock in the market.”  

Long queues with empty cylinders are common sight everywhere in the Kathmandu valley. Consumers, particularly women and children are seen waiting outside the retail outlets for their turns to get a filled cylinder.

The LPG crisis has deepened with the Valley consumers, in particular, bearing the brunt due to the unofficial trade embargo imposed by India since September 22.

The situation is even worse outside the Capital. On Thursday, Dhading locals vented their anger at the prolonged shortage of cooking gas by camping outside the Kathmandu Metro bottling plant at Thakre, Mahade-vsthan and prevented shipments to Kathmandu.

Staging a sit-in outside the factory with empty cylinders, they stopped around 500 cylinders from being dispatched to the Valley. The irate crowd accused the company of not distributing cooking gas to the locals first. As a sever fuel shortage started to cripple everyday life, the Ministry of Commerce and Supplies on Wednesday permitted LPG bottlers to distribute half-filled (7.1kg) cooking gas cylinders to the people in the Valley beginning on Friday. Distributing LPG cylinders with reduced volume is aimed at providing cooking gas to more people. Yet the distribution of cooking gas was left at the mercy of a limited number of distributors. “We heard that the local distributors will be given half-filled cylinders, but we did not receive any till the evening,” said Narayan Bhandari, a distributor of Baba and Nepal cooking gas at Setopool.

During cooking gas shortages in the past, Bhandari used to prepare a waiting list of customers to distribute LPG. But he has not maintained such list this time around as he fears the current fuel shortage will be resolved any time soon. “If it comes, it will be distributed through the queue system.”

The Nepal LPG Industries Association said around 25,000 half-filled cylinders of four bottling plants—Everest, Salt Trading Corporation, Siddhartha and HP—were distributed on Friday and Saturday.

“We had planned to distribute cylinders from a number of dealers across the Valley, but that was not possible due to security concerns as panic begins to set in among the frustrated consumers,” said association’s President Shiva Ghimire. He, however, said the distribution would continue on Sunday and Monday.

Gas bottlers and dealers said that country’s monthly LPG demand stands at 32,000 tonnes which soars 30-40 percent during winter. However, the Indian Oil Corporation has sharply cut the supply of LPG to Nepal since the unofficial trade embargo.

According to the NOC, more than 225 gas bullets have been stuck on the Indian side of the border. A bullet carries 18 tons of LPG which can fill upto 1,062 cylinders.