Kumar Shanker is currently the Managing Director of Maharashtra Natural Gas Limited (MNGL), which is a City Gas Distribution (CGD) Company in India that is jointly promoted by Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) and GAIL (India) Limited.
He is a Chemical Engineer from B.I.T.S. Pilani with more than 31 years of rich and diverse experience in the natural gas industry encompassing Commissioning and Operations of Gas Processing Plants, Project Management of Petrochemical Units, Corporate Strategy & Planning, Marketing & Regulatory functions, and CGD sector.
At present, under his leadership, MNGL has grown from strength to strength, and today MNGL is amongst the top five CGD companies in India in terms of growth, profitability, and development of infrastructure for domestic piped gas connections.
Earlier, over a period of three decades, he has worked in various business verticals of GAIL covering several locations in India including Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi.
He has extensive experience in Regulatory matters across a wide spectrum of areas related to grant of authorizations, open access, pipeline tariffs, affiliate-code of conduct etc.
He has been actively engaged in several important policy and regulatory changes that have evolved over the past two decades in the Indian natural gas sector.
He has made important presentations on various policy and regulatory matters to the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, NITI Aayog and the Petroleum & Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB), and they have all been well received for its thoughts and ideas. He has played an important role in the introduction of Unified Tariff for the National Gas Grid System in the country which is hailed as a noteworthy reform in the natural gas sector in India.
In GAIL, he was instrumental in launching a pioneering initiative of On-line Pipeline Open Access Portal which provides a real-time single-window platform for smooth and easy booking of common carrier capacity in all GAIL’s gas pipelines.
He was also a co-chair of a sub-committee on Low Emissions Gas Task Force formed under the US-India Strategic Clean Energy Partnership.