Petrol, Diesel Prices Hiked Again: Total Hike At 4 Rupees/Liter
The weekly fuel budget has taken a sharp hit again, with petrol and diesel prices raised by about 90 paise per litre across major cities. This is the second increase in less than a week, coming on the back of a 3 rupee per litre hike just a few days earlier. Put together, petrol and diesel have become costlier by roughly 4 rupees per litre in under seven days, resetting what every regular car and bike owner pays at the pump.
In the national capital, petrol prices have moved to around 98.6 rupees per litre, up from 97.7 rupees earlier. Diesel there now costs close to 91.6 rupees per litre compared to about 90.7 rupees before the latest hike. Mumbai’s rates are higher still, with petrol at about 107.6 rupees per litre and diesel around 94.1 rupees. Kolkata and Chennai are in the same band, with Kolkata’s petrol now above 109 rupees per litre and Chennai’s above 104 rupees. The pattern is clear: in every metro, fuel has become meaningfully more expensive in the space of a week.
For most users, the immediate question is how quickly this shows up in monthly expenses. Consider a compact petrol hatchback that returns 14 km per litre in city traffic.
An owner doing 1,200 km a month uses around 85 litres of petrol. A 4 rupee per litre increase lifts their monthly fuel spend by roughly 340 rupees. Over a year, that is about 4,000 rupees extra, without any change in usage.
Higher-mileage users feel it more. A typical diesel SUV doing 2,000 km a month at 14 km per litre burns about 143 litres of diesel. With diesel up 4 rupees per litre, the monthly outgo rises by nearly 570 rupees, or close to 7,000 rupees a year. For taxi fleets and app-cab drivers, who often run 3,000 to 4,000 km per month, the additional fuel cost can easily cross 1,000 rupees a month per vehicle, squeezing margins unless fares are adjusted.
Two-wheeler owners are not insulated either. A scooter delivering 40 km per litre and covering 800 km a month consumes about 20 litres of petrol. The 4 rupee per litre hike adds roughly 80 rupees per month, which may look small in isolation but stacks up alongside higher cooking gas, food and EMI outgo. Households running multiple vehicles feel the impact across all of them at the same time.
At the policy and industry level, the hikes are linked to sustained high international crude oil prices and a long freeze in domestic pump rates. For nearly four years, state-run oil marketing companies had kept retail prices unchanged despite crude moving up sharply. During this period, they were selling petrol and diesel at a loss on every litre, absorbing under-recoveries while the government cut excise to cushion consumers.
Recent estimates from the petroleum ministry indicate that before the latest hikes, oil marketing companies were losing around 20 rupees per litre on petrol and close to 100 rupees per litre on diesel. That translated into daily losses of nearly 1,000 crore rupees across petrol, diesel and LPG combined. The earlier 3 rupee per litre hike was projected to reduce these under-recoveries meaningfully, and the follow-up 90 paise increase trims them further. Even after both hikes, however, the companies are still not fully breaking even on every litre sold.
The government’s balancing act has been to delay large, frequent price moves while crude stayed elevated, then permit a cluster of increases once losses for state-run retailers became too large to sustain. The gap between global prices and domestic pump rates had become wide enough that continuing the freeze would have required either fresh budgetary support or more tax cuts, both of which carry their own fiscal and political costs.
In the immediate future, the only lever in a driver’s control is usage and efficiency. Simple habits like combining errands into fewer trips, avoiding heavy-footed acceleration, keeping tyres correctly inflated and sticking to recommended service intervals can improve real-world fuel economy by 5 to 10 percent. For a car owner spending 8,000 to 10,000 rupees a month on fuel, that saving can offset a fair portion of the recent hikes.
Some users may advance upgrade plans towards more efficient cars, CNG versions or strong hybrids, but those are medium-term decisions and depend on budget and availability. For now, the reality is that fuel has become around 4 rupees per litre costlier in a week, and both households and businesses will need to rework their monthly numbers to account for it!