T

he Denpasar branch of state oil and gas firm PT Pertamina has found itself pinned to the wall again.

On Monday, dozens of protesters gathered in front of its office building on Jl. Letda Regong in Denpasar, demanding that the people they represented receive the free gas stove they were qualified to receive under the distribution program.

They claimed to have been left out of the program, which began in the city on Dec. 2007.

The protest was a reaction toward the branch's recent statement, which said it would finish the conversion program in Bali by June this year, proudly listing the areas where the conversion program was thought to have been completed and the regions where the conversion program had begun.

Protesters lambasted the statement, saying that the branch had not even finished providing free gas stoves to the areas the branch said were cleared.

"We have proof that 28 families who deserve these gas stoves in one hamlet in East Denpasar have not received *the packages* yet, when others have," said Yanti, a member of the Volunteer Corps for Motherland Freedom, or Spartan.

The group represented the families in a meeting with Pertamina officials at the latter's office.

Public protests of this kind are not new, but the rally highlighted that more than two years since Pertamina began distributing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), the state oil firm had still not managed to phase out kerosene usage among poor families.

The government started the nationwide kerosene-to-gas conversion program in December 2006 with the help of Pertamina to weed out the use of kerosene among households and cut government spending on fuel subsidies.

While the program has been well received in Denpasar, a symptomatic snag still lingers. The decrease in the supply of kerosene, which was part of the program, has caused kerosene prices to skyrocket and forced poor households without a free gas stove to reel in the costs.

Kerosene currently costs up to Rp 7,000 (58 US cents), which is more than triple the allowed price of government-subsidized kerosene.

Munawir, a resident living in East Denpasar, deplored the amount of money she had to spend on kerosene, saying that she could be using it to buy basic food ingredients for her food stall instead.

Pertamina LPG sales representative Fedi Alberto said the company would talk to the package distributor, state-owned postal company PT Pos Indonesia, over the packages' distribution.

"We will also try to get the city administration to review its list of residents who are eligible to receive the packages," he told the demonstrators.