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There are no short-cuts to get poor households across rural India to give up biomass such as firewood, crop residue and dung cakes as their primary cooking fuels in favour of cleaner ones such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), as the Centre has discovered after launching the ambitious Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. The scheme succeeded in getting millions of poor households acquire LPG connection using the ₹1,600 financial assistance but has not managed to get people to move en masse away from biomass to the cleaner gas. Rather, as a recently published study called ACCESS by the Council for Energy, Environment and Water across six cities shows, a large number of households stack LPG and biomass. Only a small proportion of these households use LPG alone for cooking. The reasons vary. Affordability of refill is a major reason. Difficulty in getting a refill is another. The CEEW study across Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha found people were unwilling to pay upfront ₹900-1,000 for a 14 kg refill but would pay about ₹300 for a refill. That is about the price of refilling a 5 kg cylinder.
The PMUY rules were amended to allow households to opt for two 5 kg cylinders instead of one 14 kg cylinder initially and shift to a 14 kg one after a few months. That is based on two assumptions — the household’s willingness to pay for the fuel will rise and that the household will get habituated to the convenience of cooking with LPG which will lead to increased consumption of the fuel. While it is true that use of cylinders does increase over the years, the assumption ignores the volatility in rural incomes. It also ignores that that most rural women do not have a say in determining when a refill is ordered, even though the connection is in their name.
The government and the oil marketing companies would ,therefore, need to find ways in which they can get more households to use LPG as their primary fuel. For one, the option of getting a 5-kg refill for a few years along with the subsidy may just help.
Tina Edwin is Senior Deputy Editor
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