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Centralized gas supply services available at 53% villages in Russia

Russia's Prime Minister noted that installation of gas supply services in the rural areas was brought to 53% in recent years

MOSCOW, August 30 (Itar-Tass) - Average level of provision of gas supply services in Russia has exceeded 83% and pipeline gas accounts for more than a half of it, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Friday at a conference on installation of gas supply services in the rural areas.

“At the beginning of the year, the rate of installation of gas supplies stood at over 83% and pipeline gas accounted for almost 65% of it, with liquefied gas totaling 18%,” he said.

Medvedev recalled work in that direction had begun more than ten years before that but the start of active efforts fell on 2005.

“We proceed from a simple consideration, namely, that a country possessing the largest deposits of natural gas and topping the global list of exporters doesn’t have the right to shun the advantages for its own development,” he said. “This refers to creating normal conditions for people’s life not only in large cities but also in the rural areas.”

“I’m pleased to note that we’ve brought the installation of gas supply services in the rural areas to 53% in recent years,” Medvedev said adding that the figure was considerably small at the start of the project.

“That’s an apparently encouraging aspect that has been reached over the past eight years,” he said.

This project was conceived as an area of joint responsibility of Gazprom OJSC, the major producer of natural gas in Russia, and the regional authorities. “We agreed that Gazprom would build pipelines between townships and villages and the local authorities would build the pipelines inside population centers and would also install distribution equipment in buildings and boiler houses.”

He admitted along with it that in some case work had been done better than the average, while in other cases it had not.

“That’s not good because it means the infrastructure that’s already been built is idling while people are still stuck on the waiting lists for getting pipeline gas and neither the industrial sector nor agriculture receive additional impulses for development and therefore the necessary investment,” Medvedev said.

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