The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana is facing challenges to achieve its ambitious goal of popularizing cleaner fuel.
What is PMUJ about?
Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) aims to safeguard the health of women & children by providing them with a clean cooking fuel LPG.
The scheme try to ensure women empowerment by issuing connection in the name of women of the households.
Under the scheme identification of the beneficiaries i.e. BPL families will be done through Socio Economic Caste Census Data.
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.
What are the challenges before the scheme?
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.
Affordability of refill and difficulty in getting a refill are the reasons for this scenario.
In rural India many households are using biomass such as firewood, crop residue and dung cakes as their primary cooking fuels which are much affordable for them.
The CEEW study across Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha found people were unwilling to pay upfront Rs.900-1,000 for a 14 kg refill but would pay about Rs.300 for a refill which is about the price of refilling a 5 kg cylinder.
While it is true that use of cylinders does increase over the years, the assumption of union government on cylinder consumption 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.
What lies ahead?
The government and the oil marketing companies 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.
