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The drive to shift towards cleaner cooking fuels has borne fruits with India’s annual kerosene consumption falling by over 20 per cent in financial year 2017.
According to data shared by the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC), India’s kerosene consumption stood at 5.3 million tonne in financial year 2017, down from 6.8 million tonne in financial year 2016. Comparably, LPG consumption grew by nearly 10 per cent at 21.5 million tonne in 2016-2017, higher than the previous fiscal’s 19.6 million tonne.
LPG connectionsPlummeting kerosene consumption is also due to the increasing penetration of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) — government distributes LPG connections under a subsidised scheme. During 2016-17, public sector oil marketing companies (OMCs) released 3.25 crore new LPG connections. Of these, two crore were released under PMUY.
The government aims to cover five crore households under PMUY till 2018-19. This target is expected to be met and even revised upward, as the government beat its fiscal 2017 target of 1.5 crore by over 50 lakh new connections.
At present, there are 19.88 crore active consumers, according to an official statement, which works out to an estimated 72.8 per cent national LPG coverage. The government target is nearly 84 per cent.
The Central government has been lowering the allocation of kerosene to State governments in a bid to promote LPG over the other. Senior Vice-President at ICRA Ltd, K Ravichandran, told BusinessLine , “There has been a decline in the annual kerosene allocation to State governments by the Centre. This is being done to encourage states to promote LPG distribution.”
Rural electrificationRavichandran also said that there has also been a lowering of overall kerosene use for illumination purposes as the government has increased rural electrification. According to the information shared by the Ministry of Power, there were 18,452 un-electrified villages as of April 2015, but the number decreased to 4,309 as of April 2017.
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