Consumers on Sunday underwent the same old suffering — long queues at different Dhaka city filling stations — despite paying increased prices for fuel oils.

They expected that long queues, mismanagement by pump operators and inadequate supply by the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation they had suffered over the past one month would be over as the new prices came into effect on the day.

But paying more than 16 per cent higher prices for a litre of octane and petrol and 15 per cent for diesel, consumers could not break the jinx of the prolonged fuel oil crisis, costing valuable working hours.

A motorcyclist while queueing for more than four hours at a filling station at Shahbagh in the capital said that he was ready to spend more to get rid of hassles of long wait to get ‘rationing’ petrol.

Pump operators said that the BPC was maintaining its inadequate supply against high demand, forcing many pumps in the city to make operation for limited hours or keep the sales suspended.

Farmers at a filling station on the Dhaka-Mawa Highway were seen making a long queue with containers and fuel pass from morning, but pump operators failed to provide them with diesel until 2:00pm.

Farmers alleged that besides the long delay, they had been supplied with one-third of their requirement.

Lamenting over the price hike of a litre diesel by 15 per cent, they said that it would push up their production cost of agricultural outputs.

Finance minister Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury played down the price hike of fuel oils, saying that they had increased it by a very negligible amount compared with the rest of the world amid the war in the Gulf region, a key source of global energy supply.

Briefing reporters on the day at the secretariat in the capital after his week-long visit to Washington for attending meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, he said that fuel oil prices doubled in the United States and Sri Lanka hiked by 25 per cent.

Ruling out any link of the latest upward adjustment of fuel oils in the local market to the release of stalled IMF loan tranches of about $1.3 billion, he said that the upward adjustment was crucial to keeping other economic programmes running.

Power, energy and mineral resources minister Iqbal Hassan Mahmood while speaking to reporters at the secretariat on the day said that they were forced to raise the fuel oil prices because of high import costs.

He, however, said that the new prices were still below actual import costs.

Anti-hoarding drives throughout the country have been going on, with 5,525 litres — diesel 1,358 litres, petrol 3,917 litres and octane 250 litres — recovered as of April 19.