When the gas runs out mid-shaadi season
Imagine booking a wedding hall months in advance, finalising a spread of live tawa rotis, sizzlers, and freshly flipped dosas at the counter — and then finding out two days before the event that the LPG cylinders simply won't arrive. That was the reality facing caterers and banquet managers across India on 14 and 15 March, when a reported LPG shortage disrupted supply chains at one of the busiest points in the wedding calendar.
The timing could hardly have been worse. March sits squarely inside India's extended winter wedding season, and weekends during this window are typically booked solid — sometimes with multiple events running back to back at the same venue.
What actually changed on the ground
The most visible casualty of the shortage was the live counter — that beloved fixture of the Indian wedding buffet where a cook stands behind a flame, ladling out hot jalebis, tossing stir-fries, or rolling out fresh bread to order. Live counters depend entirely on a steady LPG supply, and with cylinders scarce or delayed, caterers had little choice but to pull them from the menu.
For guests, this meant falling back on pre-cooked dishes kept warm in chafing trays — functional, but a far cry from the theatrical, made-to-order experience that many families specifically pay a premium for. Caterers reportedly scrambled to substitute with electric induction setups where available, though these carry their own limitations in a large banquet setting and cannot always replicate the same scale or flavour.
Why this matters for a wedding banquets audience in India
India's wedding industry is estimated to be worth hundreds of thousands of crores, and food is consistently cited as the element guests remember most — or complain about most loudly on social media. A disruption like this one is a sharp reminder of how dependent the entire banquet ecosystem is on a single fuel source.
For banquet managers and wedding planners, the March shortage is a case study in contingency planning. A few practical takeaways stand out: maintaining a small reserve stock of cylinders ahead of peak weekends, building induction-based backup stations into venue infrastructure, and being transparent with families early if a live counter must be dropped rather than letting guests discover it on the day.
For couples planning summer or monsoon-season weddings — both of which are seeing growing popularity as destination and indoor events — it may be worth having an explicit conversation with your caterer about fuel backup plans before signing the contract. The sizzle at a live counter is a small thing, until it isn't there.