Why some data here is incomplete

A personal note from the person who built this site.

— Rachit, September 2026

I built XP100 Finder because there was no reliable public list of which pumps in India actually sell ethanol-free petrol. The Right to Information Act, 2005 turned out to be the most reliable way to get real answers, so I filed three RTI requests — one to each oil company selling an ethanol-free grade.

Two worked close to as intended. IOCL replied to its RTI (IOCLD/R/E/26/03343) on 8 September 2026 with a list of 209 XP100 outlets by name, address, city and state — more than the 142 the site had carried from IOCL's public locator — along with written confirmation that XP100 is not blended with ethanol. HPCL, in direct response to an RTI filing, sent back a clean list of all 17 poWer100 outlets nationwide — names, districts, states, no exemptions claimed, no resistance. That reply is a large part of why this site could launch with real data instead of guesses.

BPCL's response was different, and I think it's worth describing honestly, because it's a useful example of how a public authority can technically comply with the RTI Act while giving you almost nothing.

What BPCL actually said

Asked for the names and locations of Speed 100 outlets, BPCL confirmed a number — 117 outlets nationwide — but declined to say where any of them are. Two grounds were cited.

First, that compiling the list would "disproportionately engage resources and time" across BPCL's 72 territory offices, under Section 7(9) of the Act. That section governs the form information is given in, not whether it can be withheld altogether — and the reply undercuts its own reasoning anyway, since handing over the aggregate figure of 117 required exactly the kind of collation the reply claims is too burdensome to do at all.

Second, that outlet locations are commercially confidential, under Section 8(1)(d), because "Speed is a proprietary brand." I don't find this persuasive. A retail petrol pump's location isn't a trade secret — it's a sign on a building anyone can drive up to. And the inconsistency across companies makes the point better than I can: HPCL gave the same category of information, for a comparably niche product, without claiming any exemption at all.

Then the appeal process itself became an obstacle

RTI gives you the right to appeal a denial like this. I tried to file that appeal through the central government's RTI Online Portal, as the Act intends. It failed repeatedly over several days, with an error saying my registration number and email didn't match — despite both being copied exactly from BPCL's own reply and my original filing confirmation. No amount of retyping fixed it. I was preparing to fall back to filing by post when the portal started working again, and the appeal went through on 3 September 2026, registered as BPCLD/A/E/26/00512. It is now pending.

Two smaller things from that process are worth recording, because they are the kind of friction that doesn't show up in any statistic. The appeal text box rejected my submission silently — no error, no explanation — because the text contained paragraph breaks, which the portal's character rules don't permit but don't mention either. And the supporting-document upload rejected a valid PDF as "not a PDF." Neither is a scandal. Both are the sort of thing that makes a person give up.

I want to be careful here: I don't know whether that portal failure was a bug, negligence, or something else, and I'm not going to claim more certainty than I have. What I can say is that it isn't a new complaint. RTI activists and news reporting have separately documented portal features disappearing without explanation, and years of application records going missing from the same system, in years prior to this one. I'm one more small data point in a pattern other people have already flagged.

The replies themselves, in full, are on the RTI record page.

Why this matters beyond one fuel-finder website

Nobody was denied information about anything urgent here. It's a website about petrol pumps. But that's sort of the point: if getting a basic outlet list out of a public sector company requires citing the Act's own text back at a CPIO, and then spending several days fighting a filing portal that rejects valid submissions without saying why, it's worth asking what that means for RTI requests that carry more weight than mine does.

The RTI Act says exemptions should be read narrowly, and that the burden of justifying a denial sits with the public authority, not the citizen. In practice, on this request, neither held. I don't think that adds up to a scandal. I think it's closer to what handicapping transparency actually looks like day to day — not a dramatic cover-up, just enough friction, broadly-worded exemptions, and unreliable infrastructure that most people give up before getting an answer.

What this means for the data on this site

The Speed 100 listings marked with an approximate-location flag stay that way until the appeal resolves, however long that takes. I'd rather show an honest gap than a guess dressed up as certainty. If you're curious how an RTI request or appeal actually works, or want to try one yourself for something that matters more to you than petrol stations do, it's a more usable right than its reputation suggests — slower and clunkier than it should be, but usable.