India’s state-run oil marketing companies launched a media blitzkrieg on Tuesday to justify a recent price hike in petrol prices and came out strongly against allegations of profiteering at the consumers’ expense.
Their logic, however, failed to answer why, while being entirely dependent on state subsidy, they are still eager to reward shareholders with rich dividends.
Here is the background.
A flurry of protests swept India recently after oil retailers announced the steepest price rise in the country’s history, leading to a partial rollback.
Oil marketing companies are reeling under heavy losses, and a price rise was necessary to fund operations, oil refiners said then, but that did not prevent public outrage.
The anger was justified — a lot of Indians use petrol as the fuel for their vehicles and a steep rise in prices disturbs their budgets.
The ‘reform agenda’ understood as ‘market-oriented reform’ or giving more space to market mechanism in food and fuel economy seems to 
