Petrol price inches closer to century mark in Mumbai

The price of petrol increased by 17-19 paisa per litre while the diesel price increased by 28-30 paisa per litre across metro cities of the country.

New Delhi: The repeated rise in fuel prices in May is all set to take the retail price of petrol to historic high levels of Rs 100 per litre in Mumbai.

Continuing with fuel price hike momentum maintained this month, the Oil marketing companies (OMCs) raised the pump prices of petrol and diesel again on Friday across the country.

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The price of petrol increased by 17-19 paisa per litre while the diesel price increased by 28-30 paisa per litre across metro cities of the country.

With this increase retail price of petrol has now reached Rs 99.32 per litre in Mumbai, just few days off from reaching Rs 100 per litre mark of price rise momentum is maintained by OMCs.

Petrol prices are already over Rs 100 per litre in several cities in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. Premium petrol has been hovering above that level for some time now.

In the month of May, fuel prices have already increased over 11 days so far. This has taken up the price of petrol by Rs 2.49 a litre Delhi. Similarly, diesel price rose by Rs 3.07 per litre in the capital this month.

Before Friday, OMC were revising fuel prices on every alternate day for last one week rather than undertaking changes on a daily basis as has been practiced.

Under daily price revision, OMCs revise petrol and diesel prices every morning benchmarking retail fuel prices to a 15-day rolling average of global refined products’ prices and dollar exchange rate. However, in a market where fuel prices need to be increased successively, alternate day price revision seems to be the flavour.

IANS had written earlier that OMCs may begin increasing the retail price of petrol and diesel post state elections as they were incurring losses to the tune of Rs 2-3 per litre by holding the price line despite higher global crude and product prices.

With global crude prices at around $ 66 a barrel mark (lower than $ 70 it touched last week), OMCs may keep a watch and spare consumers from any further increase in fuel prices for some time now.