India to start filling strategic oil reserve this month: Min

India will start keeping a strategic oil reserve from this month, which would be located at Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan said today.
"We will start keeping a strategic oil reserve from this month. It will have 1.3 million tonnes initially and will be kept at Visakhapatnam. Preparations are afoot and the required oil is already on its way from Iraq," Pradhan told PTI.
The Union minister said India had no strategic oil reserve till now and the initiative would help it tide over any crisis on the oil front.
"Our plan is to build a capacity of 5 million tonnes strategic reserve of oil in the first phase. This amount of oil will run the country for 13 days in case of any eventuality. We will increase the capacity of the reserve in the second phase," Pradhan said.

The minister was in Patna after returning from the OPEC summit in Vienna, where India was the only consumer nation invited.
"We have demanded that the system of 'Asian premium' which India has to pay while purchasing oil should be terminated. European countries do not have to pay it and they get oil at a lesser rate. This will lead to a substantial saving of foreign exchange to the country as India spent foreign exchange worth Rs 6 lakh crore last year for importing oil," he said.
Pradhan said that his ministry had impressed upon the OPEC that India was the fourth largest buyer of petroleum products after China, US and Japan and was on its way to climb to the third spot soon as per International Energy Agency (IEA) reports.

"We told OPEC that till now you sold we bought, but this relation should not just be limited to a buyer-seller relationship. They should consider our position and should understand that we are not just a customer, but a very big customer. There should be some say of customers too," Pradhan said.