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>What do you mean? There are multiple suppliers and gas stations are owned by private entities.

To own a gas station you need to get several licenses and permits from the gas companies which are mostly government owned like Indian Oil. These companies will not give licenses to anyone unless you are politically connected and willing to pay huge sums of bribes. Last time I checked the bribes for a highway patrol pump camp to around USD 900K not worth it. Of course if you are son in law of the right minister you get this for free giving you a $900K head start over your competition.

> there is always a shortage and you will see huge lines to fill up gas

I mean shortages of gas stations and not gas. I can give anecdotal evidence but the oil companies have a plan to double total number of gas stations in India from 65K to 120K in next 5 years that alone should tell you a lot about current state. (USA for example has declining number of gas stations).

> Almost all apartments constructed for past 10 - 15 years, and that is a lot mind you, have designated parking spaces for each and every apartment.

I hope so, and I hope they have the ability to retrofit these spots with charging stations with mechanisms to pay for that electricity.

Government have been tweaking excise rates. Petrol and Diesel is cheaper everywhere except India, Indian government made 30% revenue increase in exise during lockdown period when all other taxes went down.

Funny enough, no one in the country raised voice against it.

Fuel is what affects price of everything from grocery to your mobile phone shipped through Amazon, so why is government collecting and increasing this tax on people?

Historically, the higher taxes on petrol was used to subsidize diesel prices, because most of the agrarian sector and transport sector predominantly depends on diesel. Worldwide, diesel costs more than petrol (though by not that much). Some of the taxes also go towards subsidies for LPG, which is a major source of heating in many house holds in India.

However, taxes can come down. Geo-politically speaking though, it is in the interest of the govt. that the consumption of fuels is kept to a minimum, as we don't have any significant oil reserves.

Some people have given me feedback that my writing seems biased because of strong words I use but then I can not pretend to be "unbiased" here because the amount of needless human suffering I have seen because of these asinine horrible policies.

Growing up we had no gas station in the 20Km radius. We owned a "moped" and we had to carefully plan our trips keeping that in mind. This was a not a demand supply problem because everyone and their brother owned mopeds like us. Some folks would smuggle petrol and store it in large metal barrels in their homes and then sell it at 15% profit. Occasionally they use to catch fire killing people and little children. The person would than be seen as a horrible criminal who deserved what he go for storing gas illegally.

Since a major trade highway went through our town it was actually no brainer to put a gas station in the vicinity but two people who owned gas stations on the same highway would go to great lengths to stop any new license for being issued, it reached to a level where they even murdered would be gas station owners. Eventually an even bigger goon managed to setup a gas station solving a lot of these problems but the gas continued to remain expensive as government taxed it around 100%.

Energy is the foundation of all economic activity. Part of the reason why USA is the most prosperous country on earth is because some amazing entrepreneurs like Rockfeller managed to reduce the price of gas to a fraction of what it was before them. India's abject poverty is primarily because of how tightly Indian government controls the entire energy market. From electricity to Petrol everything is not just tightly controlled but has the most perverse rent seeking policies around it.

Apartments now do have designated spots, but thats not where most cars are.

I don't know about smaller and older ones, but in most of the new ones, no one will tolerate a car being in any other place than the designated spot.