Following the historic Goods & Service Tax implementation, here’s an another milestone move and this time, it drags your wheels. However, more or less this appears bit typical, from May 14th of this year, petrol pump dealers in seven states and Puducherry will shut shop on Sundays, it was announced on Tuesday.

Two factors are assumed as the reasons behind this move made by the Petrol Dealers’ Association. The primary hope was to arm-twist oil companies into shelling out the higher commission, and secondly, it wants to respond to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to conserve petroleum products which are on the edge.

Ravi Shinde, president of the Mumbai Petrol Dealers’ Association has said that all those operated by dealers will be closed on Sundays. And it is believed that there are 233 petrol pumps in Mumbai, out of which 223 are run by dealers and the rest are owned and run by oil marketing companies.

All summed up, the dealers from seven states – Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Haryana – and one union territory, Puducherry, have agreed to shut their fuel pumps starting from May 14th.

“While exact figures are not available for sales on Sundays, it will be around 20 per cent less.” said KP Murali, the president of the Tamil Nadu Petroleum Dealers Association.

On the other side, the president of the Federation of All Maharashtra Petrol Dealers Association, Uday Lodh has said:

“The decision came in to support the various demands made by the three public sector oil companies which have not reviewed dealer margins since 2011, the low margins, along with a high evaporation rate and the minimum salary to be paid to employees, are leading to huge losses.”

The terms of agreement regarding the acceptance of this move by the company owned and company operated fuel pumps is in ambiguity.