Fuelling problems

With LPG price crossing the ₹1,000-mark, the poor are forced to return to unclean cooking fuels

- SEEMA PRASAD

FARM LABOURER Mahadefrom Karnataka, sha groundnut farmer R Chandrashekharreddy from Andhra Pradesh, homemaker Geeta from Haryana and slum dweller Naresh from Ghaziabad are facing the same dilemma. The cost of a liquified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder has crossed over ₹1,000 on the back of regular price revisions and this is forcing them to make unfair choices about their basic standard of life.

"If I buy an LPG cylinder now, then I will not be able to send my children to school this month," says 35-year-old Mahadesha from Thigadahalli village in Karnataka. His calculation is simple. Over the past year, LPG cylinders have become almost ₹200 costlier, which is half of what he spends on sending his two children to school (see 'Constant pinch' on p15). "If we continue to use LPG, then cooking fuel alone would eat up one-fourth of my household income," he says.

Some 600 km away, Chandrashekharreddy, the owner of a two-hectare farm in Kandukur village in Andhra Pradesh, is busy setting up a firewood stove at home. "I simply cannot afford LPG with my monthly income of ₹8,500 anymore," he says. Almost 10 per cent of the households in his village have already rolled back to using fuelwood. "Most other families are also thinking of going the same way," he says.

In the pre-pandemic period, an average poor household in the country could at most spend ₹15 a day, or ₹450 a month, on cooking fuel, says Svati Bhogle, founder of Sustaintech India Private Limited, a company that provides fuel-efficient cookstove to women street food vendors in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. "The income of most poor families have shrunk after the pandemic. A ₹200 rise in LPG basically means it has become out of reach for them," says Bhogle.