Anatomy of oil pilferage

Tamper-proof locks fail to arrest the growing trend

Oil pilferage. This is big business in Bangalore, a racket fuelled by a nexus of shady tanker operators, willing oil firm insiders and retail bunk staffers.

Ferrying fuel from the distant Devanagunthi oil terminal to the city’s 450 plus petrol bunks and beyond, the tankers remain the racket’s formidable resource. Unlocking the fuel tank keys with clinical ease, the tankers leak deliberately, as they fan out to feed the city’s gas-guzzling maze of 50 lakh vehicles!

Stung by this festering menace, bunk owners are now pushing the oil companies to get into action mode. The pilferage, they insist, will continue if the transportation costs remained low. “The oil firms cannot continue to give only Rs. 1.91 per km per kilolitre as transportation cost. The contractors are bound to go ahead with the practice,” the proprietor of a prominent city bunk told Deccan Herald.

To rationalise the rates and to address the pilferage issue head-on, the bunk owners and their association now see a solution in a Committee. The government-consituted panel, they have proposed, should include the transport contractors, State transport department officials, oil firm representatives and the retailers.

Their rationale is clear: Bunks cannot operate their own tankers, as many are now forced to do, to tide over the issues.

Ten years ago, when tamper-proof Abloy locks replaced the vulnerable plastic seals on tankers, most in the industry believed pilferage would be history. “Abloy locks had keys that were non-replicable. You had to use a computer-aided lathe machine to duplicate a key. But over the years, people have evolved techniques to do that too,” admitted a senior official in Indian Oil Company (IOC). 

Unlocking Abloy locks

In theory, the business of oil transport is safe and secure. Once the tankers are filled at the vast Devanagunthi terminal on the city’s outskirts, they are sealed and firmly secured with the Abloy locks. There are only two sets of keys, one with the company and the other set retained by the dealers to unlock the tankers at the bunks.  Yet, the tanker truck operators manage to duplicate the keys and, as sources assert, take out about 60 litres, on an average, from each truck. The tankers typically carry 12 and 20 kilo litres, and the pilferage is hard to detect.  

Bunk owners insist that the keys are transferred for manipulation, by company insiders themselves, although the oil firms debunk such a possibility. Once the keys are accessed, pilferage from the tanker is a matter of a few minutes.

The estimated 35-km distance from the terminal to the city offers ample scope to complete that task with professional ease, say sources. Tracking the movement and route of the tankers using GPS could be one way out. But nobody believes this is a foolproof, insurmountable challenge for the stealth brigade.