On Monday, the last week of the year, the oil marketing companies kept the primp prices of petrol and diesel unchanged, maintaining the trend started in the second week of December despite firm global oil prices.

 

Accordingly, the pump price of petrol remained at Rs 83.71 a litre and diesel Rs 73.87 a litre in Delhi on Monday. Across the country as well the price of the two petroleum products remained unchanged.

 

The price of petrol in Mumbai remained at Rs 90.34 and diesel Rs 80.51, the two fuels remains at Rs 86.51 and Rs 79.31 a litre respectively in Chennai. The retail price of petrol remains at Rs 85.19 and Rs 77.44 a litre in Kolkata.

 

OMCs have gone on a pause mode at a time when the news of successful coronavirus and expectations of big pick up in demand had kept crude on the boil with prices breaching $ 50 a barrel mark.

 

Petrol price was very close to breaching the all-time high level of Rs 84 a litre (reached on October 4, 2018) when it touched Rs 83.71 a litre on December 7. But the march has been halted ever since then with no price revision by the OMCs.

 

With Monday's pause, fuel prices have now increased on 15 of the past 38 days with petrol price rising by Rs 2.65 per litre and diesel by 3.41 a litre.

 

Earlier, petrol price had been static since September 22, and diesel rates hadn't changed since October 2. It started rising in November and again went for pause since December 8.

 

Though retail pricing of petrol and diesel has been deregulated and oil marketing companies were following a daily price revision formula, the same was suspended for almost two months to prevent volatility in international oil markets from impacting fuel prices regularly during the pandemic.