The five city gas distribution trends of 2026: national coverage, the 15% gas target, CNG and PNG growth, mandatory biogas blending, and digitalization.
The defining city gas distribution trends of 2025 are a network that has reached almost the entire country, a policy push to make gas a larger share of India's energy mix, rapid CNG and PNG connection growth, the first mandatory compressed biogas blending, and the move of CGD operations onto digital and cloud systems. Together they set up 2026 as the year operators scale, and the ones that plan for that scale now will absorb it without breaking their billing and field operations.
For a decade, city gas distribution in India was a story of expansion: winning geographical areas and laying pipe. In 2025 the story changed. The network is now largely built out, and the question shifts from where to expand to how to operate at scale. That is a different challenge, and it is where gas utility management software moves from a nice-to-have to the system that decides whether an operator can run what it has built.
The five trends below are the ones a CGD operator, planner, or investor should be tracking as 2025 turns into 2026. Each is backed by current data, and each carries a practical consequence for how a distribution business is run.
The headline trend is coverage. India's CGD network now spans 307 geographical areas across roughly 784 districts, reaching close to 100 percent of the country's geographical area, according to PNGRB figures reported in 2025. The land-grab phase is essentially over.
What comes next is a buildout of connections and infrastructure inside those areas. PNGRB's minimum work programme targets 126.3 million PNG connections and 18,336 CNG stations by 2034, and in 2024 to 2025 alone operators added roughly 1,206 CNG stations and 2.1 million PNG connections, per figures compiled by IBEF.
For an operator, this scale is an asset-management problem before it is anything else. Tracking skids, regulators, pipelines, and meters across a national footprint is exactly the load that gas utility asset management software exists to carry.
The buildout is not happening in a vacuum. It sits under a national target to raise natural gas to 15 percent of India's energy mix by 2030, up from about 6.3 percent, set by the Government of India. That is a more than doubling of gas's share in the energy basket, backed by grid expansion, LNG terminals, and CGD growth.
Policy-backed demand changes the risk profile of a CGD investment. Connection growth is no longer a bet on adoption; it is aligned with a stated national direction. For an operator, that makes the case for investing in the systems to handle volume, rather than waiting to see whether the volume arrives.
Is your operation planned around the connections you have today, or the ones national policy is pushing toward 2030?
The clearest demand signal in 2025 is on the road and in the home. CNG vehicle numbers rose by nearly 25 percent between March 2023 and March 2025, reaching about 8.2 million, per IBEF. PNG household connections are growing on a similar trajectory as new geographical areas come online.
Every new CNG station and PNG connection is a new revenue point that has to be metered, billed, and served. Growth of this pace is where billing systems built for a single city start to strain, which is why operators are re-evaluating their platforms against roundups like the top gas billing software of 2026. The trend to watch is not just how many connections are added, but whether the billing operation can absorb them without adding proportional headcount.
Until recently, cleaner gas was an aspiration. In 2025 it became an obligation. India's Compressed Biogas Blending Obligation, approved by the National Biofuels Coordination Committee, is voluntary through FY 2024-25 and mandatory from FY 2025-26, requiring CGD entities to blend compressed biogas into the CNG and PNG they sell, per analysis of the obligation.
Blending is not just a supply arrangement; it is a tracking and reporting requirement layered onto field operations. Operators now have to account for blended volumes across the network, which raises the bar on the data discipline behind gas pipeline and field work order systems.
Can your systems evidence blended-fuel volumes across the network when the regulator asks?
The operational trend running underneath all of the above is digitalization. The sector's stated technology direction points to cloud-based SCADA for scalability and AI for anomaly detection, joining real-time control-room data with GIS and back-office systems.
For most operators the near-term move is more practical: consolidating billing, metering, assets, and consumer service onto one platform rather than running separate tools. That is the logic behind the shift to cloud-based gas utility billing software, which turns a fragmented stack into one system that can scale with the network.
Trends are only useful if they change what you do. The table maps each trend to the action it calls for, and the steps below sequence that response.
Which of these five trends is your operation least ready for going into 2026?
That is usually where the next investment should go.
The five defining trends are near-complete national network coverage across 307 geographical areas, a policy target to raise gas to 15 percent of the energy mix by 2030, fast growth in CNG vehicles and PNG connections, the first mandatory compressed biogas blending from FY 2025-26, and the digitalization of operations through cloud, SCADA, GIS, and AI.
Yes. India's Compressed Biogas Blending Obligation is voluntary through FY 2024-25 and mandatory from FY 2025-26, starting at 1 percent of CNG and PNG consumption and rising to 5 percent from FY 2028-29. CGD entities must blend compressed biogas into the fuel they sell and account for the blended volumes.
PNGRB's minimum work programme targets 126.3 million PNG connections and 18,336 CNG stations by 2034. The network already covers close to 100 percent of India's geographical area across 307 geographical areas, so the growth ahead is in connections and infrastructure inside those areas rather than in new coverage.
The direction is toward cloud-based SCADA for scalability, AI for anomaly detection, GIS for network management, and consolidation of billing, metering, assets, and consumer service onto a single platform. The practical near-term move for most operators is replacing fragmented tools with one system that scales with the network.
SMART360 is a cloud-native platform for gas utilities that runs billing, metering, assets, and consumer service in one system, built to scale with a growing CGD network rather than strain against it.
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