High price of LPG cylinders forcing the poor to return to firewood

At the price of Rs 819, LPG refills beyond the reach of most PMUY beneficiaries.

Nisha, a mother of five daughters in Bagsara village in Uttar Pradesh, is back to working in a smoky kitchen as she is once again using firewood and cowdung as her cooking fuel. She and her husband, who is a carpenter, cannot afford the domestic LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) cylinders whose prices have shot up sharply since November last year.

Nisha had got an LPG connection under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) three years ago. But the steep rise in the price of cylinders has put them beyond her reach. “The cylinder is just too expensive for us now. There are many mouths to feed in our family and we consume at least one cylinder a month. At the present price point, we cannot use LPG at all,” she says.

Nisha is not alone. Bagsara, a medium-sized hamlet about 150 kilometres from the national capital, has a population mix of daily wage workers and farmers. The villagers here are mostly going back to firewood to meet their primary cooking needs because they can no longer afford LPG refills.

The price of a 14.2 kg domestic LPG cylinder has been hiked from Rs 594 a cylinder on November 1, 2020 to Rs 819 a cylinder on March 1, 2021. This, a nearly 40 per cent increase in price, has hit beneficiaries of the PMUY the hardest.

Sameena, another housewife in Bagsara, says, “LPG cylinders are so expensive now that we are using them only for making tea if guests arrive. We have switched back to firewood, which is available for free.” Sameena, who got the cooking gas connection under the PMUY scheme four years ago, hasn’t got her cylinder refilled in the last two months.

Those who got LPG connections under the PMUY are not the only ones deferring refills. Nazir, an Indane consumer for 18 years, says that he, too, has not taken a refill in two months.

Madan Lal, another Bagsara resident who has been an HP Gas consumer for 15 years, also flags the high cost of LPG. “Cylinders were affordable when they cost around Rs 350 or Rs 450. At current prices, they are being used only for urgent cooking needs. We would definitely use more LPG if it was cheaper,” he says.

Today, most consumers, including those in villages, recognise the benefits of using cooking gas as opposed to the health hazard and inconvenience of firewood. Yet, the high cost of LPG is forcing them to revert to the latter.

Says Nazir, “Now the entire area gets covered in thick smoke since many homes use their firewood stoves at the same time while cooking food.”

Adds Rakesh Sharma, a farmer and LPG consumer for the past four years, “Farmers are already finding it difficult because of the high cost of diesel and electricity. There needs to be some action on the part of the government to make our lives better.”

The price of a subsidised domestic LPG cylinder was increased from around Rs 494.35 in July 2019 to Rs 594 in July 2020. The Centre then stopped offering financial support to consumers in the form of direct benefit transfers to the accounts of beneficiaries. LPG prices were kept unchanged at Rs 594 per cylinder from July to November-end 2020.

In April 2020 the Centre offered three free LPG cylinders each to 80 million PMUY recipients. This was part of the Atmanirbhar packages announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The full cost of three cylinders was transferred in three installments to the bank accounts of PMUY beneficiaries, who could then buy the cylinders at market price.

This had driven up the country’s LPG consumption early on during the lockdown.

Currently, there is partial support for consumers in remote areas (usually far from LPG depots) and the Centre continues to subsidise the freight charges for these. However, the subsidy is under Rs 30 per cylinder.

“I have got a refund (freight subsidy) of around Rs 20 for the cylinders I book. This is too little and, with no kerosene available, there is no option but to keep buying the expensive LPG cylinders,” says a snack shop owner in Dibai, a small city around 140 km from Delhi.

The Centre has been phasing out kerosene and replacing it with LPG through the PMUY. In her Budget 2021 speech, Sitharaman announced that an additional 10 million free cooking gas connections would be disbursed. This was also the first budget with nil allocation for kerosene subsidy. But with high LPG prices, the government may find it difficult to ensure sustained adoption of cooking gas.

However, government-owned oil marketing companies (OMCs) insist that LPG consumption has improved amongst PMUY customers. “It is notable that the improvement in the overall LPG consumption has continued for the three-month period of December 2020-Feb 2021 and has registered a growth of 7.3 per cent for all domestic LPG customers (PMUY and non-PMUY),” nearly identical statements from Indian Oil, Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum said.

“LPG consumption amongst PMUY customers registered a growth of 19.5 per cent, from 8.45 million tonnes in the comparable period in the last fiscal to 10.10 million tonnes in the current fiscal for the said three-month period,” the statements added.