Connecting The Dots

Data analytics helps government identify 10,000 locations to open new LPG dealerships.

- Aarti Gupta

VILLAGE GURUNDIA is one of the 51,311 dots on the map of Odisha — one for each village. The dot gets bigger on the district map — showing 30 in all — and changes into an amoeba-like shape on the map of Sundergarh, one of the state’s 315 blocks. Zoom in further, and you can see the house of Sunita, 35, who doesn’t struggle with cooking for a large family any longer as a new Indian Oil LPG dealership has been commissioned just four km from her house. Getting a refill no longer means a daunting 20 km trek hefting a cylinder.

If three crore women like Sunita in 710 districts are feeling privileged over the past 16 months, it is because, for the first time — with the help of some heavy data analytics — the government is directing opening of LPG distribution centres in areas that need them the most and not where companies see the most demand. In three years, 10,000 LPG centres will be opened so that almost every citizen in each of the 6.4 lakh villages has a distributor within 10-15 km of their homes.

The effort by the government is part of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana under which five crore LPG connections will be provided to below poverty line, or BPL, families with a support of ₹1,600 per connection. Issuing connections, however, is only half the recipe for ensuring 100 per cent LPG use. Supply will also have to be sustained over time.