India’s natural gas grid is mostly built, slowly being finished, and barely being added to. PNGRB’s own monthly pipeline report for August 2026 puts 28,157 km in operation out of 34,978 km authorised, as of June 2026. Its common-carrier lines have 7,033 km still to build, spread over 15 pipelines; almost all of that length belongs to lines authorised between 2011 and 2020, and 4 of them, with 1,629 km between them, have not lowered a single kilometre of pipe. Only one new gas trunk line has been authorised since 2023, and two others bid out in 2023–24 have no award.

The map below shows where the work is. It combines the regulator’s line-by-line status, the lines PNGRB has authorised or bid out but nobody has started, the routes its 2025 expert committee proposes for 2040, and the Gazette notices by which the petroleum ministry acquires the right to lay pipe under private land.

The map

Orange lines are where pipe is being laid: the North-East grid, the Mehsana–Bhatinda line across Rajasthan to Punjab and on to Jammu, the unfinished parts of the Kochi–Bengaluru and Ennore–Bengaluru lines in the south, Srikakulam–Angul on the east coast, the last stretches of the Jagdishpur–Haldia–Bokaro–Dhamra line, and the long-stalled Mallavaram–Bhilwara line through the centre. Red dashes are authorised lines with no pipe laid. The purple markers are pipelines that had right-of-user notices published in the Gazette in 2025–26; filled markers are gas lines.

How much is built

PNGRB, “PNGRB MIS Report: NGPL – Natural Gas Pipelines, Month of August 2026” (Statistics Division; data submitted by entities; length data quarterly, as on June 2026). The common-carrier and GAIL rows are summed from its entity chart; the under-construction total equals the sum of the line-by-line table below. PPAC’s December 2025 figures are shown for comparison; its under-construction figure includes tie-in and dedicated lines.

GAIL owns 18,354 km of the 26,646 km of operating common-carrier pipeline, about 69%. Operating length rose by about 730 km between PPAC’s December 2025 figure and PNGRB’s June 2026 one. GAIL’s Mumbai–Nagpur–Jharsuguda line is now listed as operating, with 1,707 of its 1,755 km built.

Where pipe is being laid, line by line

PNGRB MIS report, NGPL, August 2026, page 2 (partially commissioned and under-construction common-carrier pipelines). “Pipe lowered” and “hydrotested” are construction progress on the unbuilt part as reported by each entity; Ennore–Tuticorin’s figures (1,282 km lowered against 310 km under construction) appear to be cumulative, so they are not shown. Target dates are as printed: several have passed, one (Dabhol–Bangalore, February 2013) by thirteen years.

The regulator’s table separates real work from paper. On the North-East grid, 1,139 km of pipe has been lowered and 795 km hydrotested beyond the 392 km in operation — the largest active build in the country. GAIL is finishing the Kochi line to Bengaluru (288 km lowered of 429), Srikakulam–Angul and the Jagdishpur–Dhamra tails, and has lowered 152 of the 160 km of Gurdaspur–Jammu. Mehsana–Bhatinda has 604 km left but only 6 km lowered. Mallavaram–Bhopal–Bhilwara–Vijaipur, due in March 2020, has 1,516 km unbuilt and none lowered.

Four authorised lines show no pipe lowered at all: Kakinada–Vijayawada–Nellore (authorised 2018), Kanai Chhata–Panitar (2019), Ennore–Nellore (2014; its authorisation was reported cancelled in 2019, yet it is still listed), and the newly authorised Kochi–Kanyakumari–Thoothukudi (March 2026, due March 2029). Hazaribagh–Ranchi has 8 km lowered of 71 against a February 2026 target. PNGRB’s 2025 committee proposed alternate routes for the first two, and for Jaigarh–Mangalore, which no longer appears in the report.

Built, but carrying little gas

PNGRB MIS report, NGPL, August 2026, page 4 (monthly figures). Regulation numbers refer to PNGRB’s authorisation regulations.

The pipelines PNGRB has awarded by competitive bidding since 2008 carried 15 MMSCMD in August 2026 against 315 MMSCMD of capacity, about 5%. The older GAIL lines authorised before the regulator existed ran at 50%, and GSPL’s Gujarat grid at 75%. Line by line, Dahej–Uran–Panvel–Dabhol ran at 124% of its capacity, GSPL’s high-pressure Gujarat grid at 89% and the HVJ trunk at 70%; Mehsana–Bhatinda and Ennore–Tuticorin at 7%, Mumbai–Nagpur–Jharsuguda and the North-East grid at 4%, and Srikakulam–Angul at 0%. The newest lines were built to reach markets that do not yet take much gas, which is the same pattern this blog found in LNG terminals.

City gas: the other pipe being laid

Most of the pipe going into the ground in India is not trunk line but city gas distribution. PNGRB’s city gas report for August 2026 shows its authorised networks with 3,30,815 inch-km of steel pipeline laid against a pro-rata target of 4,10,808 inch-km (81%) and a full work-programme target of 5,47,158 inch-km. They have built 9,115 CNG stations against a pro-rata target of 7,698, but connected 1.75 crore homes to piped gas against a pro-rata target of 4.62 crore (38%). The newest areas, authorised in 2024 across the North-East, Sikkim and Jammu and Kashmir, report almost nothing built yet, which matches the North-East trunk grid still being under construction.

What the Gazette shows: land being acquired now

Before a pipeline can be laid across private land, the petroleum ministry publishes a notice under section 3(1) of the 1962 Right of User Act naming the villages and survey numbers on the route, then a section 6(1) declaration once objections are settled. This piece found notices from 2025–26 for at least five gas projects (counting the North-East grid’s sections once) and nine crude, product, ethane or LPG lines.

Notices under the Petroleum and Minerals Pipelines (Acquisition of Right of User in Land) Act, 1962: section 3(1) announces the intention to acquire the right of user along a route and invites objections; section 6(1) declares it acquired. Every entry was first found through search-result summaries of the Gazette or of legal-notice sites; on 28 October 2026 the S.O. numbers were checked against the Gazette’s own text through the SansadSaar index of the archive.org Gazette of India collection, and two were corrected. Three numbers that index does not hold are marked as reported. About a dozen ONGC field and gathering-line notices are left out. Two reported numbers that do not fit the Gazette’s own numbering sequence have been dropped.

The North-East grid has the most fresh gas notices, consistent with PNGRB’s figures showing it as the largest active build. Some notices are not new work: parts of Mumbai–Nagpur–Jharsuguda had been reported mechanically complete before notices for those stretches appeared. No 2025–26 notice was found for Kochi–Kanyakumari–Thoothukudi, Mallavaram–Bhilwara or the stalled Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal lines; absence from search results is not proof that none exists.

Bids and approvals: few new lines

The only new gas trunk line authorised since 2023 is IOCL’s 425 km Kochi–Kanyakumari–Thoothukudi line, dated 9 March 2026 in PNGRB’s report, which would connect Petronet’s under-used Kochi LNG terminal to IOCL’s Ennore–Tuticorin system; IOCL’s board approved ₹2,448.70 crore for it on 21 September 2026. PNGRB’s 2026 bidding round has been for LPG pipelines. From 1 January 2026 PNGRB also cut the unified gas transport tariff from three zones to two, about ₹54/MMBtu up to 300 km and ₹102.86 beyond, with city gas paying the first rate everywhere.

PNGRB bid notices and approvals as reported in the trade press; Global Energy Monitor for the Jaigarh–Mangalore cancellation.

The PNGRB committee’s 2040 plan lists 25 further routes totalling about 9,600 km — the blue dotted lines on the map, one of which (Kochi–Kanyakumari) has since been authorised.

What doesn’t follow from any of this

The map is schematic: each line is drawn through the towns its route names, not along its surveyed alignment, and the Gazette markers sit at district level. Line status and utilisation come from PNGRB’s August 2026 reports, which rest on data the pipeline companies submit; target dates are printed as the companies last gave them and many have passed. Lowered and hydrotested lengths may be defined differently by different companies. The Gazette entries were found through search summaries and then checked against the Gazette’s own text where the SansadSaar index holds the notice; three were not found there. A right-of-user notice shows land being acquired, not pipe being laid.

What would fix this

• PNGRB should publish its monthly pipeline report as a machine-readable table, with every past target date for each line beside the current one, so that a target of February 2013 still printed in 2026 is visible as thirteen years of slippage.
• PNGRB should decide the authorisations with no pipe laid — Kakinada–Vijayawada–Nellore, Kanai Chhata–Panitar and Ennore–Nellore — by cancelling or re-bidding them, so its committee’s alternate routes can be offered.
• PNGRB should require bid-out pipelines to report contracted and used capacity separately, so the 5% utilisation of competitively bid lines can be traced to missing demand, missing connections or missing contracts.
• The petroleum ministry should publish an index of its Right of User Act notices by pipeline, section and date, so that land acquisition can be tracked against construction.
• PNGRB should report the outcome of the Ennore–Barshi and Jammu–Srinagar bids, which closed in May 2024.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.