Reliance Industries to shut its retail petrol pumps

Reliance Industries, the country’s largest private sector company, has decided to shut down all the petroleum retail outlets owned by it directly as surging crude prices and the absence of government subsidies have made operations unviable. “We are kept out of the ambit of the government-sponsored survival package. We have decided to close all our company-owned retail outlets. It has become unviable to transport fuel from our depots to retail outlets as the throughput from our retail outlets has almost become zero. We are not going to re-fuel any of our retail outlets and this will eventually lead to clousure of such outlets till stocks last,” a source close to the development told ET. A Reliance spokesperson declined to respond to an ET questionnaire on the issue.