Petrol price hike and its effects on our day to day life

Petrol has become an indispensable part of our day-to-day life, and we can’t imagine our life without it. But the petrol prices are sky rocketing, and it is eventually going to affect each and everything that we use in our day to day life. Poor people are already working hard to earn square meal a day and this hike is definitely going to paralyze these already-burdened people. Within three years petrol price has increased 10 times and is still increasing. It is nothing but adding fuel to the fire. Petrol hike directly or indirectly affects all the major sectors like transportation, textiles, auto, FMCG etc, for manufacturing & transportation. This affects the prices of daily essential commodities which are transported on a daily basis. Banking sector is also expected to suffer due to high inflation level.

Increase in fuel price will also increase in food price. This will have a more severe impact on poor people because poor households spend more than half of their income on food and only a tenth on fuel. It is a chain reaction once started will affect all. Increase in petrol price will increase the transportation cost, increase in transportation cost will increase in price of goods, and this increase in price of goods would gradually force the people to loosen their pockets even more, and so on like this, the chain will further propagate. These ups and downs push more people into poverty and leading to a more pathetic situation of those already poor. This has obviously sent shock waves to the common man who is trying hard to make both ends meet. Price hike affects only the low wages or fixed salaried middle class families as compared to higher wages salaried class. The existing middle class is squeezed and many of those striving to attain the middle-class standard find it persistently out of remit will bring no negative impact on government employees as their DAs will be increase accordingly. Rich and corrupted people are least bothered of it. Business class like auto-rickshaw drivers shall transfer the burden to common people so they are also safe. Common people if doing business shall also pass the burden to customers and chain reactions. The community that suffers the most is the common people or “aam aadmi”.

So what are we thinking? For the situation to get worse or are we waiting for such a heroic person who’ll bring us out of this situation. No, we, the people are the one to do something and control the situation. Stop blaming government and think how to solve it. We Indians import oil from different countries. We don’t have enough oil to meet our requirements. So we have to depend on import of oil. If there is increase in international price then we have to bear price hike in India also. Then value of rupee in comparison with dollar is becoming weaker in international market. Increase in number of vehicles also causes hike in petrol prices. So the thing we can do is to reduce oil consumption by using public transport for travelling to routine places like our office, markets etc. Use of high capacity transport system like train, ships instead of trucks and carrier vans. Use of cycles to go to nearby places instead of bikes or cars. Cutting off fuel supply or switching the engine off when traffic is halted for long. Developing alternate sources of energy like solar energy etc. Development of bio-diesel, and government should allocate more funds for developing alternate sources of energy as well as develop high capacity goods and public transport system.  At last but not least I want to say petrol is a natural resource and limited in nature. We have to use it judiciously so that our future generations can also use it, and thus lead to sustainable development. As someone has rightly said,

Priyanka Singh