The oil ministry has sought special bonds worth Rs 20,871 crore from the finance ministry, in order to make up for the losses suffered by state-run retailers on fuel sales in the three quarters of this fiscal.

It has been reported that the state-run oil marketers have lost about Rs 26,618 crore in revenue on selling petrol, diesel, cooking gas and kerosene at the prices influenced by the government, during the first half of this fiscal year. While Rs 20,000 crore of this loss is on cooking gas and kerosene and the rest is on account of petrol and diesel.

As the government had not allowed the oil marketers to raise the prices, at the time when the prices of the international crude oil were rising rapidly, the government had promised that it would make good their losses by issuing bonds to them. But so far, such bond permissions has not been issued to Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum, which has caused these firms to report net losses in the July-September quarter.

HPCL has incurred a net loss of Rs 136 crore and BPCL posted a net loss of Rs 158 crore in the second quarter. On the contrary, the IOC has registered a net profit of Rs 284 crore. The government had decided to make good all revenue loss on the sale of domestic LPG and kerosene through issue of bonds, while losses on petrol and diesel were promised to be met by discounts from the explorers, ONGC and OIL besides cooking gas-maker and gas transporter GAIL.

IOC has informed that it has been making a loss of Rs 94 crore per day on the sale of petrol, diesel, domestic LPG and PDS kerosene.

The oil companies including, IOC, BPCL and HPCL are currently selling petrol at Rs 3.68 a litre below the cost and diesel at Rs 2.90 a litre lower than the cost.

They have incurred under-realization of Rs 18.13 per litre on kerosene and Rs 250.67 on the sale of each domestic LPG cylinder.