Prime Minister Narendra Modi is all set to lay the foundation stone of the highly ambitious gas pipeline project ‘Urja Ganga’  in his Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi. The gas pipeline project aims to provide piped cooking gas to residents of Varanasi within two years and, in another year after that, cater to millions of people in states like Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha.

From Varanasi’s perspective, an 800-km long MDPI pipeline will be laid and 50,000 households and 20,000 vehicles will get PNG and CNG gas respectively. The government estimates that around 5 lakh gas cylinders will be sent at rural areas annually.

According to GAIL, with the Urja Ganga project, 20 lakh households will get PNG connections. The project is said to be a major step towards collective growth and development of the Eastern region of India. GAIL has built a network of trunk pipelines covering the length of around 11,000 km. With Urja Ganga project, this number will further increase by 2540 km. Work on the 2540-km long Jagdishpur-Haldia and Bokaro-Dhamra Natural Gas pipeline project will begin and will be completed between 2018 and 2020.

The government has combined the development of gas pipeline across the Eastern region with CDG development of cities falling within this network. Seven East India cities – Varanasi, Patna, Jamshedpur, Kolkata, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack – will be the major beneficiary of this network development.

The LNG terminal at Dhamra will provide clean fuel to the Industrial Development of the Eastern states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. 25 industrial clusters in these 5 states will be developed using gas from this pipeline.