NEW DELHI: “The gas ran out on Chhath Puja day,” recalls Phoolwati. It was a late October morning last year and the daily wage worker from Savda JJ colony near the Delhi-Haryana border had only finished half her cooking for the autumnal festival. Phoolwati’s daughter gave her Rs 300 so she could buy a refill from the black market to finish cooking.
That was the last time Phoolwati, a single mother in a family of seven, refilled the LPG cylinder she got a few years ago under the government’s flagship welfare scheme, the Prime Minister Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY). Popularly known as Ujjwala, the scheme aims to promote clean cooking in India by enabling poor women to get gas connections.
There are 96 million Ujjwala connections, as per the latest government data. It is widely believed that this scheme provides “free” gas cylinders to the poor. However, LPG connections are “given” to poor households in terms of cash assistance. The current market price of an LPG cylinder is Rs 1053 and it is what beneficiaries pay except that a subsidy of Rs 200 is passed on to them as cash transfer.
Last year, an upgraded version of the PMUY was launched, Ujjwala 2.0, to increase the number of LPG connections. This version aimed at making the scheme accessible to migrants, often seasonally, by doing away with address proof for applicants.
However, interviews with six women, mostly Dalit and migrant workers, living in three of the Capital’s low-income neighbourhoods showed that a 51.7% rise in the price of LPG refills between January 2021 and July 2022 (from Rs 694 to Rs 1053) has forced all to return, fully or partially, to traditional stoves fuelled by coal or wood. Gas stoves, they said, are being used minimally for quick cooking – brewing tea, cooking rice or chapatis, for instance.
The subsidy-as-cash-transfer system is not reaching their bank accounts even after a refill purchase, the women complained. The India Residential Energy Consumption Survey (IRES) 2020 stated that one-third of Indian households did not receive the subsidy for their last LPG refill or said they did not know if they had received it or not. This was the response of as many as 39% of those surveyed in Delhi. And across the country this response was more pronounced among Ujjwala beneficiaries.
Consider the savings made by opting for traditional stoves: some women we spoke to choose to either collect firewood from their neighbourhood parks and forests for free. But even if they buy wood – at Rs 10 a kilo – or cow dung – at ₹10 for three cakes – they make substantial savings. A family of five or more, for instance, can survive a month on firewood supplies costing ₹500-600.
The average number of LPG refills consumed by India’s urban households is 8. In 2021-22, Delhi which has 1,24,794 Ujjwala connections, 22,411 customers took four or less refills, indicating that 17.9% made do with half the gas that LPG users normally consume.
However, as has been documented, the use of traditional stoves causes considerable harm to health. Exposure to particulate matter and other pollutants emitted by traditional stoves causes diseases of the heart, lungs, brain and eyes. The risk of fire accidents and burns is another threat.
This switch also has social impacts – job loss among women during the pandemic and LPG inflation have ended up reinforcing the grip of patriarchy in families, we found. More than before, men and older women now control household decisions and expenditures. For instance, the need to economise is being added to the argument that chulha-made food “tastes better”, the women said, disregarding the labour and health impacts. A 2020 paper pointed out that PMUY “does not focus on gender dynamics within the households with respect to decision making and subsequent refills”.