India cuts back on cooking fuel subsidies, sparking air pollution spike fears

Cash-strapped New Delhi has halved the amount it sets aside for LPG cooking fuel subsidies, leaving many Indians eyeing a return to smoggier fuels

Air pollution inside houses, primarily from burning solid fuels like wood, dried dung and biomass, contributed to more than 1 million deaths in 2010

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Smoke bellows from a domestic hearth known as a ‘chulha’ that is fuelled using dung cakes in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, last month. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 3:57pm, 9 Mar 2021Updated: 3:57pm, 9 Mar 2021

Five years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government offered Indian women a chance to dramatically improve their lives with cooking fuel subsidies in what became one of his administration’s most celebrated campaigns.

Now, hamstrung by a widening fiscal deficit, New Delhi has been slowly reducing the size of those handouts – a shift that risks upsetting women voters and potentially exposing millions to heavier levels of pollution.

In Allauddinnagar, a village in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, Laxmi Kishore, a 35-year-old homemaker, is worried. Cooking food for her family used to be an ordeal that involved using cheap fuels like cow dung, crops and wood, which burn with a sooty flame and left her teary eyed and choking. When Modi’s programme made liquefied petroleum gas cylinders affordable to her some years ago, she breathed more easily.

Now Kishore is preparing to return to her earthen stove and the smoggier fuels her ancestors used because the subsidy that landed in her account each time she refilled a cylinder has stopped arriving. Her husband lost his job as a cashier in a highway restaurant during last year’s Covid-19 lockdown, making a cooking cylinder unaffordable to them without the handout.

Workers load Indian Oil Corporation liquefied petroleum gas cylinders onto a delivery truck at a village warehouse in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, last month. Photo: Bloomberg

“I’m dreading a return to my earlier pain,” Kishore said. “It will mean less sleep and suffering in the smoke again.”