Fact-check: Is the gas meter rent up from Rs40 to Rs500?
OGRA has increased the monthly rent of gas meters for only a certain category of consumers, not across the board
Updated Saturday May 06 2023
Viral tweets misleadingly claim that the government has increased the monthly rent of gas meters for all domestic consumers by 12 times.
Claim
On April 27, a Twitter user tweeted that the government had secretly increased the rent of the natural gas meter from Rs40 to Rs500.
“Now the poor person whose monthly bill was Rs300 or Rs400 will have to pay meter rent more than the price of gas,” the user wrote.
The tweet has received over 111,100 views, 2,966 likes, and 2,295 retweets, to date.
Another Twitter user made a similar claim by sharing a picture of two separate monthly bills of gas.
Fact
The claims are misleading.
The Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA), the government agency that regulates the oil and gas sector in Pakistan, has increased the monthly rent of gas meters for only a certain category of consumers, not across the board.
“The federal government in its sale price advice, effective from January, has levied a fixed charge to the tune of Rs460 for consumers whose average consumption exceeds 0.9 hm3 (cubic hectometers),” Imran Ghaznavi, the spokesperson of OGRA, told Geo Fact Check over WhatsApp.
He added that those households, which consume less than 0.9 cubic hectometers, will not be “burdened by the increase”.
Geo Fact Check also found a notification in this regard on the official website of OGRA, dated February 15, which lists the sale price and minimum charges for different categories of consumers, effective from January 1.
The “protected category”, which includes domestic consumers whose average consumption of the last four months (November to February) is below or equal to 0.9 hm3, will pay a fixed monthly rent of Rs50 for the gas meter.
The “non-protected category”, with consumption over 0.9 hm3, will pay Rs500 as a fixed charge on their gas meter per month.
Geo Fact Check further checked the gas bills of a consumer, who utilised less than 0.9 hm3 of natural gas. For the months of March and April, the consumer was charged Rs50 and not Rs500.
Thus, only domestic consumers who utilise more than 0.9hm3 of gas will have to pay a fixed rent of Rs500 per month.
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