Do you have more than one cooking gas connection at home? If yes, you better watch out. National oil companies — Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum — have begun the process of identifying those with multiple connections. Such customers must either surrender the extra connections or face the prospect of not getting refill cylinders. Multiple connections are defined as where a kitchen [house] has more than one connection. Every connection consists of two cylinders. Thus, a household, where there are connections in the name of each family member, will be defined as a multiple connection. More than one connection using the same telephone number will also come under the lens. Thanks to the transparency portal for cooking gas connections launched recently, it is easier for the oil companies to identify customers with connections of more than one company. An IOC official estimated the number of multiple connections at 1.5 crore out of the total 14 crore connections across the country. Though the companies have spoken about weeding out multiple connections in the past, this time around the threat has become real because the move follows a meeting earlier this month in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas in the wake of the rising subsidy bill, according to officials. To start with, the oil companies have handed over data pertaining to customers in Delhi, Punjab and Puducherry to the National Informatics Centre for identifying multiple connections, according to an official of Bharat Petroleum. IOC, too, has been asked by the government to do a similar exercise for customers in Noida, and complete it by July 23. The company plans to take up Chandigarh, Aurangabad and Siliguri in the next phase. In the event of two connections of single cylinder each, the customer would be asked to surrender one of them and offered a second cylinder on the other. Apart from despatching letters to the customers, the oil companies would also be instructing its distributors to undertake physical verification to ascertain the facts.