Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Jan 4: Minister of State (Independent Charge) Petroleum and Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan launched ‘1906’—round the clock LPG Emergency Helpline for enhanced customer safety and convenience in a function at New Delhi.
The number ‘1906’ is a call-centre based service, available pan-India to all LPG customers of the three public sector Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs). The centralized Emergency Service Cell (ESC) is operational through a call centre operating 24×7 to attend to LPG leakage calls.
The helpline offers services in nine vernacular languages—Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam apart from Hindi and English, to ensure that the callers are comfortable in registering their grievances. The call center is also equipped with a setup for outbound calls for contacting mechanics/distributors and oil company officials.
Though customers can access the ESC only through voice calls, the call centre is equipped with a web-based application for logging and viewing complaints. The portal houses an exhaustive data on the contact details of all LPG distributors, emergency service mechanics, and field officers, across the OMCs. The LPG area in-charges of the three OMCs have been provided access to the portal to constantly monitor call logs, and update contact details of the mechanic and field officers on a regular basis.
While speaking, Pradhan said that the initiatives taken by Petroleum Ministry in 2015 have enhanced coverage of LPG and extended better services to customers. “The policy initiatives implemented by Government of India in LPG sector has brought a paradigm shift in the LPG marketing and has taken us closer to the target of achieving 70 per cent LPG penetration as envisioned by Prime Minister, Narendra Modi”, he added.
The expansion of PAHAL, a scheme aimed to improve the subsidy administration of LPG across the country, has ensured smooth transfer of subsidy on LPG cylinder directly to the customers’ bank accounts, he said and mentioned that a host of other such initiatives for customer convenience would be offered and that the year 2016 would be celebrated as the ‘Year of the LPG consumer. Pradhan also urged to oil marketing companies to make the helpline number 1906 toll-free.
The programme was attended by KD Tripathi, Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Additional Secretary, MoP&NG, AP Sawhney, Joint Secretary (Marketing), MoP&NG, Ashutosh Jindal, Chairman, Indian Oil, B Ashok, Director (Marketing), Indian Oil, BS Canth and other senior officials from MoP&NG and oil marketing companies.
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