Are the Prices of Petrol and Diesel Determined by the Market Forces In India?
The Indian government has supposedly deregulated the determination of prices of petroleum products like petrol and diesel in India. Every time prices of these two products go up , the government plays this card of deregulation to answer the critiques e.g., recently the Modi government reduced the excise duty on petrol and diesel by 1.5 rupees to lower the daily rising prices of these two products in the shadow of coming 2019 assembly election, and when the share prices of oil companies started declining in the aftermath of this move, the ministers are now reassuring the market participants that the government would not go back to regulating fuel prices . How much truth is there in this claim of successive governments that the prices of petrol and diesel are deregulated in India and that they are determined by the market forces of demand and supply? To understand this we need to understand how market determines prices of various economic goods. A market is an organ