Karnal, April 14 -- The All India LPG Distributors Federation (North West Region) on Monday termed the government's mandate, asking LPG consumers to shift to PNG within three months, as "unjust" and said that this should be voluntary, not imposed. The distributors also criticised the government's decisions limiting LPG supply and restricting commercial supply to eateries, which further increased their workload and caused panic among consumers. A meeting of the federation was held in Karnal, where members from Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh and Chandigarh discussed their common problems arising out of the West Asia conflict. As per the orders from last month, it was regulated that the household consumers can book refills at an interval of 25 days of delivery of previous refill in urban areas and 45 days of delivery of previous refill in rural areas. E-KYC of the consumers were made compulsory for refill delivery and all new domestic connections as well as issuing 2nd cylinder, were stopped. Similarly, supply of non-domestic refills to industrial and non- essential sectors like hotel, dhabas were restricted. State president of the federation, Satinder Singh said that the steps created panic among the customers and have increased the workload on distributors and their staff manifold. "The decision differentiating rural and urban consumer's booking intervals has been the most disturbing. Also a gap of 7 to 10 days between booking delivery makes it more unbearable for the consumers. All this led to panic booking and the IVRS system crashed leading to huge footfall and long queues at the distributors office and godown for offline bookings," he said. He said that the distributor network is totally "demoralised" by the government's decision to mandatorily convert the commercial and domestic customers to PNG connection. Singh pointed out that both -- LPG and LNG are being imported in similar percentages as both are not fully produced in the country. "This conversion in the manner being envisaged will lead to lakhs of consumers converting to PNG resulting in LPG distributors and their staff being unviable and unemployed. Also the customers will be forced to pay a heavy amount in order to convert to PNG and may lead to monopoly of the PNG operators," he added....