Over 9.5 Crore LPG Connections Provided Under PMUY But Gas Refilling Woes Remain

More than 9.58 crore gas connections have been released under the PMUY scheme, as of February 2, 2023, data from the official PMUY website show. However, 9.6% of beneficiaries took no LPG cylinder refills, 11.3% took only one refill and 56.5% took four or fewer refills in 2021-22, according to data provided in the Lok Sabha in July 2022 and data from a response given in the Rajya Sabha on August 1, 2022.

A typical household using only LPG for cooking, whether in urban or rural India, would need at least seven cylinders a year to meet all its cooking energy needs, a 2020 study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a Delhi-based think tank, had found.

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MoP&NG), in May 2016, launched the PMUY as a "flagship scheme with an aim to make clean cooking fuel, such as LPG, accessible to rural households, which were otherwise using traditional cooking fuels such as firewood, coal, cow-dung cakes etc". The target was 8 crore LPG connections to poor households by March 2020. The government said that the target was met on September 7, 2019.

In 2021, the government launched PMUY 2.0 to cover an additional 1 crore households with a special focus on migrant households. The target was achieved in January 2022, as per a Lok Sabha response on February 2, 2023, along with an additional target of 60 lakh connections.

From May 21, 2022, the government announced a Rs 200 subsidy per 14.2 Kg cylinder for PMUY beneficiaries, for up to 12 refills a year during 2022-23, as per the December 2022 Rajya Sabha response.

Budget allocation

The budget allocation for "LPG connection to Poor Households" in the 2023-24 Union budget is Rs 0.01 crore, a drop of 99.99% compared to the budget estimate of Rs 800 crores and revised estimates of Rs 8,010 crores in 2022-23. The budget for the Direct Benefit Transfer as a subsidy to households for purchasing refills remained unchanged at Rs 180 crores, compared to the revised estimates of 2022-23 while it dropped by 95.5% as compared to the Rs 4,000 crore budget estimate of 2022-23.

When FactChecker asked if the scheme had been disbanded, Pardeep Kumar, from the Marketing Division of MoP&NG, clarified that the scheme is operational but refused to comment on the reasons for the fall in allocation.

FactChecker has also reached out to Sitharaman's office, Pankaj Jain, secretary, MoP&NG and Praveen Mal Khanooja, Additional Secretary, MoP&NG via phone and email for clarifications and comment on the lack of refills at the consumer end and the drop in the budget for the scheme. We will update the story when we receive a response.

Year-On-Year Budget For The Prime Minister's Ujjwala Yojana

Since 2016-17, the scheme has utilised most of the money allocated

Source: Budget document for 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24

Why people don't get cylinders refilled

The main reason for fewer cylinder refills is due to the high cost of refilling them. When PMUY was launched in May 2016, the price of a standard non-subsidised 14.2 kg LPG cylinder in Delhi was Rs 527.5. This had doubled to Rs 1,053 by July 2022, FactChecker had reported in October 2022. The prices of LPG have remained unchanged since July 2022.

Most beneficiaries IndiaSpend Hindi interviewed in January 2023 said that they didn't have enough money to refill cylinders. When asked the reason for not refilling their gas cylinders, Sukhnand Kumar from Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh said, "What do we do, we are daily wage labourers, we are unable to fill it."

"Direct benefit transfer (DBT) rules require people to first refill their cylinders before receiving a subsidy. It is difficult for poor families to get the cylinder refilled from their own pocket and to wait for the subsidy amount in the future," Binit Das, Deputy Programme Manager for renewable energy at the Centre for Science and Environment, a New Delhi-based research and advocacy think tank had told FactChecker in October 2022. "It is better that the government spend the subsidy in advance than place the economic burden of clean fuel on the poor."

"The challenge with maintaining access to LPG is because oil prices have become unaffordable at this point," Bhargav Krishna, Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a public policy think-tank based in Delhi, told FactChecker. "The scheme is dependent on states to find innovative financing mechanisms to be able to provide for running this but I don't think states are keen either."

"The prices of petroleum products in the country are linked to the price of respective products in the international market," Rameswar Teli, Minister of State in MoP&NG had told the Rajya Sabha in July 2022. India imports about 58 % of the LPG consumed domestically. LPG prices are based on the Saudi Contract Prices (CP) which had surged by 218% – from $236 per metric tonne in April 2020 to $750 per metric tonne in June 2022, according to his response.

"While there have been substantial increases in commitment to adjacent sectors such as transport, the almost total phase out of subsidies for LPG signal an end to the initially ground-breaking Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana," Krishna wrote in CPR's blog on the Union Budget 2023-24. "The lack of subsidies, coupled with the substantial increase in prices of LPG over the last year will almost certainly mean more households will revert to using polluting cooking fuels in their homes, harming the health especially of women and children."

(With inputs from Pavan Kumar Thimmavajjala, intern with IndiaSpend and FactChecker)