As the US-Israel-Iran hostilities entered their second month and Iran’s retaliatory strikes effectively choked the Strait of Hormuz, the ripple effects began to surface across global energy supply chains — testing the resilience of countries heavily dependent on imported fuels.
India was among the first to feel the strain. LPG cylinders began disappearing from shelves, depots, and doorsteps, disrupting everyday life.
The government responded by issuing the Natural Gas and Petroleum Products Distribution Order 2026, by directing the oil refineries and gas processing plants to increase LPG production by 25 per cent and introduced a 25-day inter-booking period to curb hoarding. It has also put on hold commercial supply of natural gas to hotels, restaurants, and other industries, while leaving out hospitals and educational institutions.
The government also issued an order stating that LPG supply may be discontinued within three months for households that have access to PNG but fail to switch, while acknowledging that over 6,000 PNG consumers had voluntarily surrendered their LPG connections, helping redirect supply to remote households without pipeline connectivity.
However, things have improved recently, with domestic refinery production ramped up by 40 per cent, bringing daily LPG output to 50 TMT — more than 60 per cent of India’s total daily requirement of approximately 80 TMT. The shift to PNG from LPG is understandable. Not only is there greater domestic production of PNG than LPG, but it is also much easier to transport through pipelines rather than through trucks and ships as is the case with LPG.
A Powerful Accelerator
The crisis has functioned as a powerful accelerant, with more than 2.9 lakh PNG connections — covering both domestic and commercial users — have been provided across the country in March alone. Yet, as of March 2026, India has only around 1.6 crore domestic PNG connections, with the government aiming to reach 5 crore PNG connections by 2030.
However, one major impediment behind PNG’s slow take-off among many top malls, hotels and luxury housing, despite lower costs and less vulnerability in such crises are issues of safety and aesthetics. Yellow-coloured galvanised iron pipes sticking out of the buildings are not just an eyesore for the building’s facade, but also a safety risk — gas leakage — given the high number of joints in these pipes and exposed to such extreme weather conditions.
There is, however, a faster, smarter alternative to rigid GI piping — Corrugated Stainless-Steel Tubing, or CSST — whose flexibility, light weight, and ease of installation could do what years of policy persuasion has failed to: make PNG connections genuinely quick, affordable, and accessible enough to drive real behavioural change at scale.
A battle-hardened pipe that flexes with ground shifts, resists hydrogen embrittlement, and seals joints tighter than GI ever could, and can be routed through walls, adds to the overall safety.
Moreover, since it installs easily without threading or welding at every turn and bends, it delivers significant savings on time and labour cost during its installation. Its flexibility allows workers to pull it like an electrical wire thereby routing it through walls, attics, crawl spaces, and even retrofitted into existing homes more easily without any safety issues.
However, like every crisis, this too presents an opportunity, a great opportunity for luxury apartment builders, restaurants, malls, hospitals, and industrial kitchens to shift to a PNG infrastructure. And, for the corrugated stainless steel tubing (CSST) industry, with its flexible, lightweight architecture, engineered for rapid, scalable deployment in complex-built environments, it could prove to be a defining moment.
Khan is Economist, and Member, Telangana Public Service Commission; Prakash is Partner at Acclime India
Published on April 16, 2026