Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar
Access to LPG in India has expanded to almost a 100 million families living below the poverty line on the back of a state push to improve its uptake, but sustaining their use is difficult unless overall incomes rise
Earlier this month, ministers from countries around Asia and Africa as well as private companies got together to strike deals on oil, gas, and renewables at India Energy Week in New Delhi. But amid the big-ticket agendas, a humbler energy problem also got some attention: the wood or dung-fuelled stove of the poor.
At a session devoted to clean cooking, India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas Hardeep Singh Puri touted the country’s success in transitioning poor families away from cooking with polluting solid fuels to the cleaner-burning Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). A decade-long national program has helped expand the number of household LPG connections from 140 million to 330 million, Puri said. If one assumes an average of four to five people in every home, that increase covers most of the country’s population, he noted. “The Indian model has relevance for other countries in the global south, whose population and development challenges are similar to ours, and where Western models don’t apply,” Puri said.
Is he right? As always, the answer is complicated. India’s LPG initiative certainly has many policy lessons for developing countries, but its experience also highlights the complexity of the clean cooking transition among poor communities.
Globally, the scale of this energy challenge is formidable. A third of the world’s population are thought to rely on solid-fuel stoves or open fires, which emit harmful pollutants into the air and cause a variety of health problems among some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. This household air pollution is estimated to contribute to 3.2 million deaths annually, including children under five, due to the pollution effects on heart and lung health as well as low birthweight. Experts see clean cooking as a health issue but also a gender one because the bulk of the time spent collecting firewood as well as the exposure to pollution falls largely on women. It is also seen as an issue of energy equity—the poorest access the least amount of modern energy. And it is a climate issue because some of the pollutants from wood and dung stoves contribute to global warming.
For decades, solutions were sought in improving the design of solid-fuel stoves to reduce their emissions. These ‘improved cookstoves’ were eligible for carbon credits and climate financing. But their lack of large-scale success---and with the UN making access to clean energy a sustainable development goal--led many international agencies and countries to start looking to natural gas and LPG, which is made of propane or butane. Since these are fossil fuels, that shift didn’t sit well with climate-focused funders in Europe. In 2019, the European Investment Bank stopped funding natural gas projects—except for those that supplied to the European Union, a contradiction that was not lost on African countries seeking investments in energy. At the recent India Energy Week, representatives of several African countries, including Tanzania, Sudan, and Malawi, called upon governments, donor agencies, and private companies to help them achieve their clean cooking goals, including through oil and gas exploration in their nations.
Which brings us to the ‘Indian model’. It is worth noting here that India is not the first emerging economy to invest in clean cooking fuel for its people: both Indonesia and Ecuador saw large-scale expansions in LPG in the late 2000s. But that doesn’t take away from India’s achievement. Since 2016, the government scheme Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) has expanded access to LPG to almost a 100 million families living below the poverty line. The scheme provided a free gas connection, stove and first cylinder—the upfront costs that are so often a barrier to an energy switch. The program spurred gas suppliers to expand rural distribution networks, make online bookings easier, and even relax address-proof requirements for migrants to ease sign up. The government was able to fund this in part by switching from a long-standing universal LPG subsidy to a targeted one—the program launched with a campaign asking the urban rich to give up their subsidy for the sake of rural women.
The efforts paid off. Today, between 85-97% of Indian homes have an LPG connection. According to the India Residential Energy Survey (IRES) report by the Council for Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW), use of LPG as a primary fuel jumped from 29% of all households in 2011 to 71% of all households in 2020.
However, a closer look at the data reveals a more complex picture. While more Indian homes do use LPG now, a good proportion continue to use wood, dung and other biomass alongside, especially in rural areas where biomass is easily available. The 2020 IRES Survey found that only 47% of all Indian households use LPG alone for cooking. Another large survey by the COALESCE project, a multi-institutional pollution research project led by IIT Bombay, puts that figure even lower: only 30% of homes cook with LPG exclusively, it found. That means 70% of households are still exposed to stove smoke, either through exclusive or partial use of solid fuels.
A big reason for this gap between access and usage is that even subsidised LPG is unaffordable for many poor rural families. Studies show cylinder refill rates range from as low as 1.8 times a year in Chhattisgarh to 5.3 times in Haryana—compared to 8 times a year in urban areas where most homes use LPG almost exclusively. And even in cities, families on the margins can easily slip back to using traditional stoves—as one report found in New Delhi in 2021 when LPG cylinder prices rose.
So, if India’s LPG program is a model, it is one with limits: a well-funded all-out push can indeed expand people’s access to cooking gas but sustaining their use is tougher unless overall incomes also rise. In Senegal, for instance, use of LPG declined substantially after government subsidies were removed in 2009. Even governments or donor agencies that are committed to long-term welfare subsidies might quail if oil and gas prices rise---as they did after the pandemic, slowing the global cooking transition.
In recent years, experts in India have looked into several ways to further nudge up the use of LPG. Their suggestions include measures to help overcome the lack of liquidity among poorer families by changing the timing of subsidy payout from post-purchase to pre-purchase of cylinders, for instance, or by offering smaller-size cheaper cylinders. Another recommendation has been to further refine target subsidies. One study suggests focusing subsidies on pregnant women and their families, especially in the poorest districts, would maximise health benefits. Health researchers including former WHO head Soumya Swaminathan have also suggested that expanding the national air quality program from urban to rural areas would help to fund and prioritise rural energy transitions. While New Delhi smog grabs all the headlines, studies have found that burning of solid fuels for cooking and heating is the single largest contributor to air pollution in India, especially in the northern parts of the country.
Some believe India should also be helping communities move toward electric stoves—an even healthier cooking energy—to reduce dependence on gas imports, even if it means expanding coal-based electricity in the short term. Others note the importance of broader policies for poverty alleviation and livelihood improvement so more people can afford clean cooking.
Some of these ideas came up at India Energy Week. One expert at the roundtable on clean cooking suggested using carbon finance for LPG expansion. That might seem like a contradiction—after all, carbon credits are supposed to be an instrument to shift economies away from fossil fuels to renewable energy like solar and wind. But a slew of recent research has shown climate gains from reducing biomass burning which also produces short-term warming pollutants. Soot or black carbon, for instance, is 1,000 times more warming that carbon dioxide but only lasts a few weeks, says scientist Chandra Venkatraman. Her studies show that 50% of black carbon emissions in India comes from residential biomass use, and that phasing out such fuels would have a net climate benefit.
India’s model for clean cooking focuses on a single fuel that is easily scalable. Other countries at the conference presented other pathways. Nepal is looking to targets that combine different technologies: 1 million electric stoves, 50,000 domestic biogas plants, and 645,000 improved biomass cookstoves by 2030. Tanzania minister Doto Mashaka Biteko said the country was looking at all options, from natural gas to bioethanol. The diversity of these efforts reflects the importance of context and capacity in finding solutions to energy challenges. India’s LPG program is one way.
ENERGY POVERTY AND HOUSEHOLD AIR POLLUTION  🔥A third of the world’s population, or about 2.1billion people, continue to cook over open fires or use stoves fuelled by solid fuels such as wood, coal, dung, and crop residues, which generates harmful air pollutants. 🔥In Africa, nearly four in five people are exposed to such household air pollution. In India, over 40% of people still cook with solid fuels. 🔥Globally, household air pollution is thought to contribute to 3.2 million deaths, including 237,000 under the age of 5. It also contributes to some 91·5 million disability-adjusted life-years—that is loss of time due to health issues. 🔥In India, 10 lakh deaths were attributed to household air pollution in 2021. Poor women and children are most affected by the double whammy of ambient air pollution and indoor stove smoke. 🔥Burning solid fuels at home for cooking and heating are the single largest source of annual average PM2.5 emissions in India, especially in the populated and still relatively energy poor areas of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Emissions in rural northern India are two times higher than other regions of the country, according to one study. 🔥Just a few fuels—electricity, biogas, ethanol, LPG, and high efficiency charcoal pellets—meet indoor air quality standards, according to the World Health Organisation. 🔥An estimated $4bn will need to be leveraged annually until 2030 in order to achieve universal clean cooking access, a key sustainable development goal. SOURCES: UNEP, WHO, IEA, RESEARCH STUDIES |
Earth Shifts, a monthly column on The Migration Story, will analyse the impact of global green goals amid mounting climate uncertainties on lives and livelihoods.
Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar is an environment and science journalist based in Mumbai.
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