Contingency plan in place for import of crude: Ram Naik

www.deepikaglobal.com Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, Mar 1 (UNI) Union Petroleum Minister Ram Naik today said the country had enough crude stocks for two months, allaying any fear of shortage of petroleum products in the event of a war between the United States and Iraq. Talking to newspersons after inaugurating a Crude Oil Jetty of the Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL)-Cauvery Basin Reserve (CBR) here, he said the Petroleum Ministry, to meet any exigency situations, had chalked out a contingency plan for importing crude oil from countries that do not come under the war zone. Mr Naik, however, declined to divulge the name of the countries from which crude would be imported. ''You can rest be assured that the Petroleum Ministry has made enough arrangements for importing crude from other countries in the event of a break out of a war, which India is not favouring,'' he said and added that the strategic stock piling by India when a war against Pakistan appeared imminent last year, had worked out to its advantage now. Justifying the hike in the prices of petroleum products announced in the Union Budget yesterday, he said the crude prices in the highly volatile International market shot up to 37 US dollars per barrel yesterday (an all time high in 12 years) from about 19 to 20 dollars per barrel last year in the wake of the War threat looming large. The strike in Venezuela, one of the major oil exporting countries, had contributed to this. Under these circumstances the government had no other alternative but to increase the prices of petrol and diesel or else it had to stop import of crude oil, which he said would hamper economic activity in the country. The government had worked out some sort of cushion arrangement under which the entire burden was not passed on to the consumers.