GAIL India, said on Monday, that it is going to invest as much as Rs. 15,000 crore for laying new pipelines. This investment would be done within the period of two to three years.

The state-owned gas firm is going for these pipelines since it wants to connect the consumption centers in North India to the gas sources.

B C Tripathi, the CMD of the company made this announcement during a meet organized by the PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He said that the pipelines will connect cities within Uttar Pradesh, Uttrakhand, Punjab and Haryana.

These pipelines are expected to become fully-operational by 2013 and the main cities that would be benefited are- Meerut, Saharanpur and Moradabad in UP, Dehradun in Uttrakhand, Bhatinda and Nangal in Punjab and Panipat, Hissar and Gurgaon in Haryana.

Tripathi further added that GAIL wants to increase its operation looking at the huge demand for gas in India. This is expected to go up by 20-25 per cent in the next two to three years time.

Besides this, GAIL is also looking forward to expand its cross-country network. The length of this is 10,700 km.