While the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana has been instrumental in increasing India’s liquefied petroleum gas adoption, sustained use depends on factors such as regularity of income and ease of access to free-of-cost biomass. To ensure sustained use after adoption, interventions in clean cooking energy must tie in with broader rural development.
Messages for Policy
Although LPG use has increased since 2014–15, the lower odds of PMUY households using LPG as the primary or exclusive cooking fuel imply that further targeted interventions are needed to facilitate a complete and sustained energy transition.
In areas with low LPG uptake, government schemes on rural livelihoods and employment guarantees should converge with LPG promotion to enable predictable cash flows (to pay for LPG refills) among rural households.
Village-level targeting of LPG promotion could be an efficient approach in laggard areas to promote sustained use through community-level awareness campaigns and improved LPG availability.
Promoting the use of biomass in alternative value chains — thereby creating an opportunity cost for free-of-cost biomass — will be critical to the cessation of solid fuel use in rural households.
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References
Further Reading
Jain, A. et al. Access to Clean Cooking Energy and Electricity: Survey of States 2018 (Council on Energy, Environment and Water, 2018). Largest longitudinal survey on energy access in rural India.
Kar, A., Pachauri, S., Bailis, R. & Zerriffi, H. Capital cost subsidies through India’s Ujjwala cooking gas programme promote rapid adoption of liquefied petroleum gas but not regular use. Nat. Energy 5, 125–126 (2020). Additional measures to promote regular LPG use among rural households.
Giri, A. & Aadil, A. Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana: A Demand Side Diagnostic Study of LPG Refills (Microsave, 2018). Solutions to improve affordability and availability of LPG refills among PMUY consumers.
Patnaik, S., Tripathi S., & Jain, A. Roadmap for Access to Clean Cooking Energy in India (Council on Energy, Environment and Water, 2019). A multi-fuel road map to achieve universal access to clean cooking energy in India.
Acknowledgements
The Council on Energy, Environment and Water supported time spent by S.M., A.J. and S.T. on this research. The data collection for ACCESS was supported by the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation and the National University of Singapore. C.F.G. is supported by the United States National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant no. T32 ES007322.
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Mani, S., Jain, A., Tripathi, S. et al. Sustained LPG use requires progress on broader development outcomes. Nat Energy 5, 430–431 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-0635-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-0635-4
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