All across India, vehicle owners woke up to the news that a litre of petrol or diesel was now cheaper by a single paisa. Unimpressed, one man decided to write to the prime minister.

"ONE paisa!??" an incredulous Rahul Gandhi asked in a tweet.

"If this is your idea of a prank," he told Narendra Modi, "it's childish and in poor taste." And there was a postscript, a single line alluding to a message the Congress president gave the BJP leader last Thursday: "A ONE paisa cut is not a suitable response to the #FuelChallenge I threw you last week."

The "challenge" was this: The government should lower fuel prices, or a nation-wide Congress protest would force it to do so.

And there was some confusion before the one-paisa-drop became clear - due to an error on the Indian Oil Corporation's website, which was later amended.

As if Rahul Gandhi's Thursday tweet wasn't proof enough of his disenchantment with fuel prices, he tweeted a report card on the Modi government's performance a couple of days later on its fourth anniversary.

There were a couple of A-pluses and a B-minus - for "slogan creation", "self-promotion", and "yoga". Fuel prices?.

On the same day, two top BJP ministers, Prakash Javadekar and Ravi Shankar Prasad said, the Modi administration was working on a long-term solution to the problem.

Prasad said people should understand that tax imposed on fuel is used to construct roads, and create other developmental infrastructure.