CGD Geographical Areas — District Allotment Map (Part 1 of 3)

What a "geographical area" actually is, and why the map is bidding-round shaped

Every coloured region on this map is a Geographical Area (GA) — PNGRB's unit of allocation for city-gas distribution, awarded through competitive bidding rounds to a single entity that then holds an exclusive licence to build pipeline and CNG infrastructure within it. That's why the map looks like a patchwork rather than a smooth national rollout: each GA was won in a specific bidding round, by a specific company (a mix of PSU majors, private players, and joint ventures), on its own timeline, which is also why coverage in older, earlier-round GAs tends to be far more built-out than in the newer ones added in Round 11 and 12/12A. Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri launched the 12th CGD bidding round explicitly framed around reaching 100 per cent geographical coverage of the country; the 11th round that preceded it had already pushed potential coverage to about 98 per cent of India's population and 88 per cent of its land area. After the 12/12A round concluded, PNGRB had authorised 307 GAs spanning close to 100 per cent of India's geographical area across roughly 733–784 districts (district counts vary slightly by source and reporting date) in 34 states and Union Territories.

The stated goal, in the government's own numbers

The scale of ambition behind this map is substantial and explicitly stated. PNGRB and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas have set a target of roughly 12.63 crore piped natural gas (PNG) domestic connections nationally by 2032, backed by a stated $67 billion investment plan across the natural gas sector over six years. The broader policy goal sitting behind all of it is raising natural gas's share of India's primary energy mix from about 6.2 per cent (as of 2025) to 15 per cent by 2030 — a near-threefold increase the Petroleum Minister has cited directly, meant to displace liquid-fuel and coal demand with a cleaner-burning, more easily transportable fuel, and to cut the net import bill on liquid fuels these GAs would otherwise support demand for.

Coverage on a map isn't the same as gas at a household

The more critical, industry-analyst reading of this same map is worth stating plainly, because it's the natural counterweight to the government's own framing: PNGRB's "98 per cent population, 88 per cent geography" coverage figure describes licensing authorisation, not completed infrastructure or actual household access, and shouldn't be read as a claim that gas has actually reached that share of the country. Rating agencies tracking the sector have been explicit about the gap. ICRA's own analysis has flagged that household PNG connection rollout has generally lagged the industry's official targets, attributing the shortfall to the sheer number of approvals capex-heavy pipeline-laying requires from multiple authorities before a single new connection can be switched on. CRISIL's sector research has separately noted that the shift from city-based to full-district-level GAs — the expansion this map itself visualises — has introduced real viability challenges in the newer, larger, lower-density districts added in the most recent bidding rounds, where demand aggregation is inherently slower than in the dense urban GAs awarded in the earliest rounds. Land availability and cost, once eased by government-supported allocation in the programme's early years, and the practical difficulty of building and retaining a trained technician workforce to operate and maintain a rapidly-expanding network, are cited as further structural constraints specific to this newer wave of GAs — not the older, already-built-out ones the map's darker, denser regions represent.

Put together, the map is best read as showing licensing progress toward a genuinely ambitious national target, not completed build-out: the country-wide shape PNGRB's bidding rounds have already drawn, with the harder, slower work of actually connecting households and vehicles in each newly-awarded GA still under way behind it.