The short version.

• Two different laws do two different jobs, and conflating them misreads the whole system. The Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB), under a 2006 Act, authorises a company to build and operate a specific pipeline. The Petroleum and Minerals Pipelines (Acquisition of Right of User in Land) Act, 1962 — a much older, separate law — is what MoPNG then uses to actually acquire the right to lay that authorised pipeline across private land, village by village, as construction proceeds. The gazette notifications this piece is about are almost all the second kind.
• This blog's own gazette-indexing project estimates roughly 700 of this ministry's 1,081 tracked gazette items are these land-acquisition ("ARUL Act") notices — the large majority of everything MoPNG gazettes, by volume.
• The pipelines these notices are chasing are real and large: PNGRB's own data puts India's authorised natural gas pipeline network at roughly 34,000 km, of which some three-quarters is operational and the rest under construction, against a stated ~35,000 km/2030 ambition; a further ~18,900 km of petroleum-product pipeline and, as of August 2026, a newly-expanded ~9,500 km LPG pipeline network.
• Several flagship projects are running behind their own most recent schedule: the Kochi-Koottanad-Bengaluru-Mangaluru pipeline (KKBMPL) has had its completion date revised at least twice; the Srikakulam-Angul pipeline's spur line is stuck on a pending forest clearance.
• The state-by-state table in this piece (§5) should be read as a research trail, not a verified register. Every primary and tracker source for the underlying notifications — egazette.gov.in, PNGRB's own data-bank PDFs, gazettetracker.com, and the compliance-tracker sites that write these up — was blocked from this piece's research environment. This piece also caught its own search tooling reusing the same two notification numbers for two unrelated pipelines in different searches, which is disclosed in full in §5 and §6 rather than smoothed over.

Two laws, two notifications, easy to conflate

"MoPNG issued a pipeline gazette notification" undersells how much is packed into that one sentence, because it could mean either of two structurally different actions under two different laws passed 44 years apart.

The first is authorisation, under the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board Act, 2006. PNGRB runs a bidding process and then authorises a specific entity — GAIL, a state gas company, a joint venture like Petronet or IHB Limited — to lay, build, operate and expand a named pipeline of a defined length, for a defined fluid, along a defined route. This is the regulatory and commercial approval: it fixes who gets to build the pipeline and, eventually, who can charge what tariff to move fuel through it. PNGRB publishes its own running data-bank of every pipeline it has authorised, by entity, length and status.

The second is land acquisition, under the much older Petroleum and Minerals Pipelines (Acquisition of Right of User in Land) Act, 1962 (sometimes abbreviated ARUL, PMP, or P&MP Act in the notifications themselves). Once a pipeline is authorised, the company still has to actually get onto the land it crosses — and rather than buying every parcel outright, the Act lets the Central Government declare a narrower "right of user": the right to lay, maintain and access a pipeline underground, while ownership and (mostly) surface use stay with the landowner. This runs in two notified stages: a Section 3(1) notice declaring the intention to acquire the right of user over specifically described land (triggering a 21-day objection window), followed, once objections are heard, by a Section 6(1) notice making the acquisition final. For a single national pipeline hundreds of kilometres long, this generates dozens of separate notifications as the acquisition proceeds village by village, district by district, sometimes years apart.

Almost everything in the rest of this piece is the second kind. PNGRB's authorisation records are themselves genuinely useful public data (see §3–4) and this piece draws on them directly; but the "pipeline gazette notifications" that dominate MoPNG's own gazette output, by sheer count, are ARUL Act right-of-user notices, not PNGRB authorisations.

This distinction is drawn from secondary legal-explainer sources (Lexology, Bhatt & Joshi Associates) rather than a primary reading of both Acts side by side; the Acts' own texts are consistent with this framing but this piece did not cross-check every procedural detail (e.g. exact objection-hearing timelines) against the bare statute.

The scale: this blog's own prior finding, extended

This blog's earlier deep dive into India's gazette-notification record (see "Related on this blog" below) built an independent, from-scratch database of ministry-by-ministry gazette activity. Its own research notes on the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, cross-checked again for this piece, put the ministry's total tracked gazette items (per the gazettetracker.com aggregator) at 1,081, of which the project's own research estimates roughly 700 — about two-thirds — are ARUL Act pipeline right-of-user notices specifically, rather than fuel-pricing orders, rules amendments, or anything else this ministry gazettes.

That earlier project deliberately modeled only a bounded sample of this ARUL Act traffic in its own database — 12 notifications, covering one corrigendum and four citation pairs between 2021 and 2026 — rather than the full ~700, and none of those 12 sample rows carry pipeline name, state, district, or fluid-type metadata; that level of detail was never transcribed into the database. This piece's own research (§5) is an attempt to reconstruct some of that missing state-and-project detail independently, for a different, small sample of notifications, using open web search rather than the database.

The 1,081/~700 figures are this project's own research estimates, based on reading gazettetracker.com's aggregator listing and the underlying notifications' full text (not just their titles, which the project's own notes say are sometimes misleading — several are titled "Erratum" but are actually declarations). gazettetracker.com itself was blocked for direct fetch by this piece's own research environment, so this figure is inherited from the earlier project's work rather than independently re-verified here.

What all this notification traffic is actually building: the national gas grid

The pipelines generating these notifications are not abstract. PNGRB's own published data-bank puts India's total authorised natural gas pipeline network at around 34,000 km as of its early-to-mid-2025 snapshots (33,500 km per one PNGRB press release, 33,764 km and 34,233 km in adjacent data-bank PDFs dated weeks apart — treat the exact figure as a moving target that grows with each new authorisation, not a single fixed number). Of that, roughly 25,400–25,430 km was reported operational as of mid-2025, with the remaining stretch — reported as either ~10,459 km or ~13,605 km depending on the snapshot date — under construction. The government's own stated ambition is a ~35,000 km network, part of a broader target to raise natural gas's share of India's energy mix from roughly 6.3% to 15% by 2030.

Alongside natural gas, India's petroleum product pipeline network runs to roughly 18,858 km operational plus about 1,401 km under construction, according to industry-press coverage of PNGRB's own figures. And as of August 2026, PNGRB authorised three new common-carrier LPG pipeline projects — all to be built by GAIL, together worth roughly ₹7,000 crore and covering about 1,800 km — which the regulator says will take the country's authorised LPG pipeline network from about 7,700 km to nearly 9,500 km, a jump of roughly 23.5%. The three new LPG lines: Cherlapally (Telangana) to Nagpur (Maharashtra), 556 km; Jhansi (Uttar Pradesh) to Sitarganj (Uttarakhand), 611 km; and Shikrapur (Maharashtra) to Goa and Hubli (Karnataka), 633 km. PNGRB frames the LPG push explicitly as shifting fuel movement off road tankers and onto pipe, citing lower logistics cost, less road congestion, and reduced emissions.

The wide ranges in the natural gas row reflect this piece finding several different PNGRB data-bank snapshots (dated weeks to months apart across 2024–2025) via search, each with a slightly different total as new pipelines were authorised or commissioned between snapshots — not a sign of unreliable data, but a reminder that these are live, frequently-updated figures rather than fixed facts. The petroleum-product row's "authorised" figure is this piece's own addition of its operational and under-construction figures, not a separately confirmed authorised total. pngrb.gov.in itself was blocked for direct fetch from this environment; all figures here are drawn from industry press (Indian Infrastructure, Business Standard, Free Press Journal and others) citing PNGRB's own releases and data-bank PDFs, not this piece's own read of those PDFs.

Five pipelines under construction right now, and where they actually stand

Behind the aggregate numbers in §3 are specific, named projects, several of them generating the ARUL Act notification traffic in §5 as they proceed. Their own reported schedules are worth stating plainly, because more than one has already slipped.

• Kochi–Koottanad–Bengaluru–Mangaluru Pipeline (KKBMPL), GAIL, natural gas — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Puducherry. Authorised length 1,104 km; as of 3 January 2026, 884 km laid and 628 km commissioned. Completion has been revised more than once — from an earlier target to December 2025, then to March 2026 per one industry report, with a separate report describing a further extension toward September 2026 — GAIL's own stated reason is delay in getting "hindrance-free" work fronts, i.e. exactly the kind of land-access friction the ARUL Act process exists to resolve.
• Srikakulam–Angul Gas Pipeline (SAGPL), GAIL, natural gas — Andhra Pradesh, Odisha. Total 744 km (422 km main line, 322 km spur). The main line was commissioned 26 September 2025; the spur line is held up by a pending forest clearance covering a 56 km stretch, with completion revised to June 2026.
• Jagdishpur–Haldia–Bokaro–Dhamra Pipeline (JHBDPL) / Pradhan Mantri Urja Ganga, GAIL, natural gas — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha. An estimated 2,540 km project, still reported as under construction; an earlier completion target (around March 2025) has evidently already passed, consistent with the pattern of slippage across these projects rather than a single clean date this piece could confirm.
• Mumbai–Nagpur–Jharsuguda Pipeline (MNJPL), GAIL, natural gas — Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha. 1,707 km, a PM GatiShakti priority project; targeted for commissioning by 31 December 2025, with the Mumbai–Nagpur section reported to have completed final testing in November 2025. PNGRB has separately mapped 17 Geographical Areas across roughly 60 districts along this route for future city gas distribution.
• Mehsana–Bhatinda Natural Gas Pipeline Network (including the HRRL Refinery Spurline), GAIL, natural gas — Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab. The core network is long-established; current ARUL Act activity (a Section 3(1) notice dated 25 November 2025) concerns a specific spurline extension to the HPCL-Rajasthan Refinery, not the whole network.

Individual pipeline lengths, commissioning percentages, and revised completion dates are drawn from trade press (Indian Infrastructure, PSU Connect, Indian Masterminds, InvestyWise, Machine Maker, PSU Watch) reporting GAIL's own investor and project-update disclosures; this piece did not independently verify these against GAIL's own filings. The conflicting completion-date reports for KKBMPL (March 2026 vs a further extension toward September 2026) are both reported here rather than resolved, consistent with how fast these schedules have already moved.

A state-by-state accounting of specific notifications — read the caveat first

21 states/UTs, roughly 18 distinct pipeline projects. Several rows for the same multi-state project (JHBDPL, Mehsana–Bhatinda, Mumbai–Nagpur–Jharsuguda, Paradip–Numaligarh, and the three new August 2026 LPG lines) reflect one underlying authorisation or notification thread crossing several states, not independent events. This table is explicitly not the ~700-notice universe described in §2 — it is the subset of individual pipeline projects this piece could identify and place by state via open web search, most with only one or two notification dates surfaced out of what is likely a much longer sequence of village-by-village notices for each.

What doesn't follow from any of this

None of this shows the ARUL Act process itself is being misused, delayed unfairly, or applied inconsistently — the Act's basic design (a narrower right-of-user rather than outright acquisition, a notified 21-day objection window) is a real, longstanding legal accommodation, and nothing in this piece's research found evidence it isn't being followed as written. The pipeline schedule slippages in §4 are reported by the companies themselves in their own investor and project disclosures, not uncovered by this piece — they are a normal feature of large linear infrastructure, not a specific finding of mismanagement. And the state-by-state table in §5 should not be read as a complete or authoritative register of pipeline right-of-user activity in any of the 21 states/UTs listed: it is a lower bound, built from what open web search happened to surface, and several genuinely active projects (any pipeline whose land-acquisition notices simply weren't written up by a secondary source this piece's search could find) are certainly missing from it entirely.

Sources and caveats