PMUY Cut Ujjwala Yojana to 4 LPG Cylinders. Millions Return to Smoke

Rekha, 53, has lived in Seemapuri in east Delhi for most of her adult life. She is a mother of three, works as a domestic help in the mornings, and has been a beneficiary of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) since the scheme was launched. The day Rekha's Ujjwala Yojana connection arrived, she lit the stove and left the chulha outside. No more smoke. No more eyes watering through the cooking. A blue flame that came on when she turned the knob.

Last year, when the government cut the annual subsidised cylinder entitlement from 12 to nine, Rekha began rationing. She started using the chulha occasionally — on days when she could not pull together the money needed to pay upfront before the cylinder would be delivered. The LPG stove was still there. She just could not always afford to use it.

On June 8, 2026, the government cut the entitlement again — from nine cylinders to four. Rekha heard about it through neighbours. "We are poor people," she said. "We are already facing difficulties paying for LPG because we have to pay so much money upfront and we cannot afford it. Now with only four cylinders, I do not think using LPG makes sense at all. We are thinking of stopping it completely."

Rekha is one person. But she is not an exception. Across India, millions of households covered under PMUY face the same calculation she is making this week — whether the blue flame is still worth it, or whether the chulha is simply the only realistic choice left. What is happening in Seemapuri is a preview of what experts and civil society organisations warn will happen at scale: a reversal of the single most significant clean cooking transition in India's history, driven not by preference but by the arithmetic of poverty meeting the architecture of a shrinking subsidy.

On June 8, the Union government quietly reduced the number of subsidised cooking gas cylinders available annually to beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) from nine to four. The announcement came through a press briefing by Praveen Mal Khanooja, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, without a Cabinet note, without a parliamentary debate, and without a public consultation. For 10.5 crore women from below-poverty-line households across India, it was not a policy announcement. It was the end of a decade-long promise.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched PMUY on May 1, 2016, at Ballia in Uttar Pradesh — one of India's most economically deprived districts — the scheme came with a clear and specific commitment: free LPG connections to women from below-poverty-line households, with access to 12 subsidised 14.2-kg LPG cylinders every year. The stated aim was to end dependence on firewood, cow dung and crop residue — and with it, the lung disease, the daily labour of fuel collection, and the indoor smoke that had for generations been accepted as the condition of cooking poor in India. Over the decade that followed, the annual entitlement moved in one direction only. In August 2025, the cap was cut from 12 to nine cylinders. On June 8, 2026, it was cut again — from nine to four. What began as 12 has now become 4. Two-thirds of the original promise has been withdrawn.

Also Read:GST Invoice Fraud: Why ₹58,772 Crore Slipped Through Audits

What Four Cylinders Actually Means

To understand what this decision means in practice, consider a family of six living in a village in Uttar Pradesh or Chhattisgarh — the kind of household PMUY was designed for.

When the scheme was launched, the family received a free connection — the government paid ₹1,600 covering the security deposit for the cylinder, pressure regulator, hose, and installation charges. The first refill and stove were also provided free under Ujjwala 2.0. That part has not changed. The connection remains free.

What has changed is what happens every time the family needs to cook.

A refill must be purchased. Today, a 14.2-kg LPG cylinder in Delhi costs ₹942. The family pays that amount upfront, in cash, at the door when the delivery arrives. The government then transfers ₹300 directly into the registered bank account through the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system — but only after the transaction is recorded, and only for the first four refills of the year. The effective cost per cylinder for those four refills is ₹642.

From the fifth cylinder onward, there is no transfer. The family pays ₹942 with no return.

A 14.2-kg cylinder lasts approximately 30 to 45 days for a

Rekha, 53, has lived in Seemapuri in east Delhi for most of her adult life. She is a mother of three, works as a domestic help in the mornings, and has been a beneficiary of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) since the scheme was launched. The day Rekha's Ujjwala Yojana connection arrived, she lit the stove and left the chulha outside. No more smoke. No more eyes watering through the cooking. A blue flame that came on when she turned the knob.

Last year, when the government cut the annual subsidised cylinder entitlement from 12 to nine, Rekha began rationing. She started using the chulha occasionally — on days when she could not pull together the money needed to pay upfront before the cylinder would be delivered. The LPG stove was still there. She just could not always afford to use it.

On June 8, 2026, the government cut the entitlement again — from nine cylinders to four. Rekha heard about it through neighbours. "We are poor people," she said. "We are already facing difficulties paying for LPG because we have to pay so much money upfront and we cannot afford it. Now with only four cylinders, I do not think using LPG makes sense at all. We are thinking of stopping it completely."

Rekha is one person. But she is not an exception. Across India, millions of households covered under PMUY face the same calculation she is making this week — whether the blue flame is still worth it, or whether the chulha is simply the only realistic choice left. What is happening in Seemapuri is a preview of what experts and civil society organisations warn will happen at scale: a reversal of the single most significant clean cooking transition in India's history, driven not by preference but by the arithmetic of poverty meeting the architecture of a shrinking subsidy.

On June 8, the Union government quietly reduced the number of subsidised cooking gas cylinders available annually to beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) from nine to four. The announcement came through a press briefing by Praveen Mal Khanooja, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, without a Cabinet note, without a parliamentary debate, and without a public consultation. For 10.5 crore women from below-poverty-line households across India, it was not a policy announcement. It was the end of a decade-long promise.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched PMUY on May 1, 2016, at Ballia in Uttar Pradesh — one of India's most economically deprived districts — the scheme came with a clear and specific commitment: free LPG connections to women from below-poverty-line households, with access to 12 subsidised 14.2-kg LPG cylinders every year. The stated aim was to end dependence on firewood, cow dung and crop residue — and with it, the lung disease, the daily labour of fuel collection, and the indoor smoke that had for generations been accepted as the condition of cooking poor in India. Over the decade that followed, the annual entitlement moved in one direction only. In August 2025, the cap was cut from 12 to nine cylinders. On June 8, 2026, it was cut again — from nine to four. What began as 12 has now become 4. Two-thirds of the original promise has been withdrawn.

Also Read:  GST Invoice Fraud: Why ₹58,772 Crore Slipped Through Audits

What Four Cylinders Actually Means

To understand what this decision means in practice, consider a family of six living in a village in Uttar Pradesh or Chhattisgarh — the kind of household PMUY was designed for.

When the scheme was launched, the family received a free connection — the government paid ₹1,600 covering the security deposit for the cylinder, pressure regulator, hose, and installation charges. The first refill and stove were also provided free under Ujjwala 2.0. That part has not changed. The connection remains free.

What has changed is what happens every time the family needs to cook.

A refill must be purchased. Today, a 14.2-kg LPG cylinder in Delhi costs ₹942. The family pays that amount upfront, in cash, at the door when the delivery arrives. The government then transfers ₹300 directly into the registered bank account through the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system — but only after the transaction is recorded, and only for the first four refills of the year. The effective cost per cylinder for those four refills is ₹642.

From the fifth cylinder onward, there is no transfer. The family pays ₹942 with no return.

A 14.2-kg cylinder lasts approximately 30 to 45 days for a family of four to six people cooking all meals exclusively on gas. Four cylinders therefore covers, at most, four months of the year. For the remaining eight months, the family must either pay the full market price of ₹942 per cylinder — an amount that exceeds the daily income of most agricultural labourers — or return to the chulha burning firewood, dung cakes, and crop residue.

The annual subsidy value has been cut sharply. When the cap was 12 cylinders, the maximum annual benefit was ₹3,600. After the cap was cut to nine in August 2025, it was ₹2,700. From June 8, 2026, it is ₹1,200. In less than a year, the annual monetary value of the PMUY subsidy has been cut by two-thirds — coinciding with a period in which cylinder prices rose by ₹89 in just three months.

The Poverty Trap

The government's justification for cutting the cap to four cylinders was provided by Khanooja at the June 8 briefing. "The revised entitlement broadly matches the average annual consumption of Ujjwala beneficiaries," he said. The average PMUY beneficiary, according to the government, uses four to five cylinders a year. The subsidy has therefore been aligned with actual use.

It sounds administratively reasonable. It is not.

Raj Shekhar, the national co-convenor of the Right to Food Campaign — a civil society network that has monitored welfare entitlements in India for over two decades — described the decision as deeply flawed. "Four cylinders per year is very damaging for PMUY beneficiaries," he said. "The government's justification — that average consumption is around four cylinders — is incorrect in what it implies. The government is not accounting for the reason why people are consuming less. The reason is affordability. They cannot afford to pay for LPG cylinders at current prices. We are seeing on the ground that people have already started going back to alternatives — firewood, dung cakes, whatever they can access. This year, when the conflict in West Asia began and cylinders were being sold in some areas at extremely high prices, people were cutting meals and shifting to alternative cooking methods."

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The situation Raj Shekhar described had a documented dimension. In March 2026, as the West Asia conflict disrupted LPG shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a parallel black market emerged across India. Domestic 14.2-kg cylinders were being sold for ₹2,000 to ₹4,000 in several areas — two to four times the official listed price. Commercial 19-kg cylinders reached ₹5,000 in Bengaluru's black market. In Ghaziabad, long queues formed outside gas agencies every morning, with many residents returning home without a cylinder after hours of waiting. Indian Oil Corporation deployed over 7,500 inspection teams and took action against 141 distributors for black marketing and hoarding. For the households PMUY was designed to serve — families without savings buffers, living on daily wages, unable to pay even the official price upfront — the black market price was not a number. It was a door that was closed.

Raj Shekhar added that the government's framing of a global energy crisis as justification missed a more fundamental question of policy priorities. "Yes, there is a genuine global crisis. But when there is a crisis, you have options about where the burden falls. You can raise revenue from the wealthy — impose a windfall tax, a wealth levy, something that targets those with the capacity to absorb it. The choice being made here is the opposite: the burden is being shifted onto the people least equipped to bear it."

When Smoke Returns: The Environmental and Health Cost

Every family that goes back to a chulha burning wood, dung cakes, and crop residue increases India's black carbon emissions — particles that the latest climate science has directly linked to accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas. A June 2025 study published in Communications Earth & Environment, a Nature Publishing Group journal, found that black carbon from South Asia accounted for 33.7% of glacial mass loss on the southern Tibetan Plateau between 2007 and 2016. Researchers at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) have established that household biomass burning contributes to nearly half of India's total black carbon emissions.

The health consequences are immediate and documented. The World Health Organization links household air pollution from solid fuel combustion to 2.9 million deaths globally every year, including over 309,000 deaths of children under five.

For India specifically, research published in Environmental Health Perspectives attributes approximately 1.04 million premature deaths annually to household air pollution from solid cooking fuels. Women and children — who spend the most time near the kitchen — bear the greatest burden.

Measured in Real Kitchens

The scale of this health risk is not theoretical. It has been measured, in real homes, in real time, in Delhi's own migrant labour settlements.

In November 2023, the Asia-Pacific Regional Network for Early Childhood (ARNEC) published a micro-research study titled Smokeless Kitchens: Assessing the Willingness to Adopt Cleaner Cooking Fuels among Migrant Labour Families in the National Capital Region of India. The study was authored by Bhavreen Kandhari, co-founder of Warrior Moms, a pan-India civil society collective of mothers campaigning for clean air. The research used real-time Airveda air quality monitors across three clean-fuel homes and three chulha homes in NCR migrant labour settlements, with measurements taken on January 6 and February 17, 2023.

The findings were stark — and more complex than a simple comparison. In households using LPG or induction cooking, the Air Quality Index during cooking hours ranged from 506 to 898. In chulha households, it ranged from 530 to 932. Both ranges sit well above 300 — the threshold at which the United States Environmental Protection Agency classifies air quality as hazardous, an emergency condition. The difference between the two groups was narrow. The study explains why: measurements were taken in densely packed migrant labour settlements where homes share walls and have no ventilation. Smoke from neighbours' chulhas permeated every kitchen, including those using clean fuel. The finding is not that LPG makes little difference — it is that one family switching to clean fuel cannot protect itself while surrounded by families who cannot afford to. When the government cuts the PMUY subsidy and millions return to chulhas, the air worsens for everyone in the settlement, including the families who are still managing to pay for gas.

PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations — the fine particulate matter most damaging to the respiratory system — spiked dramatically during active chulha cooking compared to clean-fuel homes across both measurement dates. The WHO safe limit for PM2.5 is 15 µg/m³ on an annual average basis and 25 µg/m³ for a 24-hour period. Concentrations recorded in chulha kitchens during cooking hours were multiples of that limit. Critically, even clean-fuel homes in the same settlements recorded elevated readings during cooking hours, as smoke from neighbouring chulhas permeated the shared, poorly ventilated spaces.

The study also conducted focus group discussions with women in these settings. The findings showed that women were not returning to biomass out of preference or habit. They expressed clear willingness to transition to cleaner fuels.

The barrier was cost and access — not choice.

The Study Said Strengthen. The Government Cut.

The ARNEC study that was submitted to the government made five recommendations. The third read: "Consider implementing targeted subsidy programs to make clean cooking fuels more affordable and accessible for vulnerable populations." The first called on the government to "continue and strengthen initiatives to address household indoor air pollution, promoting the use of clean cooking fuels and technologies."

Three years after that study was published, the government cut the Ujjwala Yojana subsidised cylinder cap from nine to four.

Bhavreen Kandhari, speaking to The Probe, described the on-ground situation since the West Asia conflict began driving prices upward. "Biomass is burning again at a scale we have not seen since before the scheme. With cylinders becoming unaffordable, households have started burning wood and whatever combustible material they can find. Our study has also showed that air quality in rooms where women were cooking with biomass was reaching AQI levels of 2,000 and above. We went into homes with our monitors. The difference between clean cooking and biomass cooking was not a matter of degree — it was categorically different. Now, with the government rolling back PMUY support, the environmental and health consequences will be severe. These are not projections. We have the measurements."

Kandhari added that the current crisis also presented an opportunity that the government was choosing not to take. "This is precisely the moment when India should be investing in the next transition — induction cooking, solar cooking, technologies that remove the dependence on imported LPG entirely. Instead of looking forward, this policy is pushing millions of families backward. That is not a response to a global crisis. That is an abdication."

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A Rising Price and a Flawed Justification

The subsidy cut on June 8 arrived alongside the second LPG price increase in three months. Following a ₹60 hike on March 7, a further ₹29 increase took effect on June 7, bringing the retail price of a 14.2-kg cylinder in Delhi to ₹942. The cumulative increase since February 2026 stands at ₹89. The government cited a 46% surge in the Saudi Contract Price — the global benchmark for LPG pricing — since February, driven by shipping disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz linked to the West Asia conflict. India imports approximately 60% of its LPG requirement, linking domestic costs directly to these international movements.

At the June 8 briefing, Khanooja offered a formulation that reframed the entire subsidy question. "Whether I'm a Ujjwala customer or a non-Ujjwala customer, I'm getting a cylinder which should have cost ₹1,600, at ₹942, even if I'm a non-Ujjwala customer. Now in that case, that is also an indirect subsidy to the customer. Now over and above that, Ujjwala customers get ₹300 more. So overall, if you see, they are getting ₹1,000. The non-Ujjwala are also getting ₹700 a cylinder."

This argument — that the gap between actual supply cost and consumer price constitutes a universal subsidy — has a surface logic but a deeper problem. By this reasoning, any government that does not pass on full costs to consumers is being generous. The decision not to raise the price to ₹1,600 is presented as a form of welfare. The framing makes it impossible for any price below full cost-recovery to be described as inadequate support for the poor. It is a definition that erases the distinction between targeted welfare for the most vulnerable and the ordinary management of a strategic commodity.

The Twenty Paise Calculation

Defending the ₹29 price increase specifically, Khanooja said it equated to roughly ₹1 per day, or "20 paise per day per household member" for a family using 12 cylinders a year. He called it a "very minor hike" compared to the ₹700 per-cylinder under-recovery being absorbed by public sector oil marketing companies.

The arithmetic is correct. The denominator is wrong.

The calculation was performed for a family consuming 12 cylinders a year. A PMUY beneficiary, by the government's own data, consumes approximately four to five cylinders a year. For such a family, the relevant calculation is not the incremental cost of a ₹29 hike spread over 12 cylinders. It is the cost of each cylinder at a time when the family must pay ₹942 upfront, receive ₹300 back for the first four purchases of the year, and pay the full ₹942 with no return from the fifth cylinder onward — at a time when that upfront sum represents multiple days of household income for a family engaged in agricultural or daily-wage labour.

What the Government's Own Auditor Found

The government was not operating without evidence. It had been told, by its own supreme audit institution, what the problem was — and what the problem was not.

CAG Report No. 14 of 2019 — a national performance audit of PMUY covering its implementation across 36 states and Union Territories from May 2016 to December 2018, analysing data from all three public-sector oil marketing companies — was tabled in Parliament in December 2019. Its findings were unambiguous.

The CAG found that the annual average refill consumption of PMUY consumers as of December 31, 2018 was 3.21 refills per connection — and that this figure was declining, not stable. It had fallen from 3.66 refills per connection among consumers who had completed one year by March 2018, to 3.21 by December of the same year. Among the 3.18 crore PMUY consumers who had completed at least one full year by December 2018, 17.61% — 0.56 crore women — had never come back for a second refill. A further 33.02% — 1.05 crore — had used only one to three cylinders in the entire year.

The report identified the reason directly. "Since the cost of refill has to be paid upfront by the BPL consumers," it stated, "this has become a constraint in ensuring sustained usage of LPG." That sentence — from India's independent constitutional auditor, in a document tabled in Parliament — is not ambiguous. It does not say families prefer biomass. It does not say awareness campaigns are needed. It identifies the upfront cash payment requirement as a structural barrier to use.

When the CAG presented these findings, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas replied that adoption of LPG "depends on several factors e.g. food habits, cooking habits, access and price." The oil marketing companies said the shift would be "a gradual process since they are habituated to their traditional cooking methods." The government's response, in other words, was to attribute low consumption to habit and culture — not to the affordability barrier its own auditor had named.

The CAG recorded its assessment of those replies: "The success of such a huge social scheme cannot be measured in terms of mere distribution of connections without ensuring the transition to clean fuel through sustained usage of LPG."

The report also documented that ₹2,617 crore in interest-free loans extended by oil marketing companies to PMUY beneficiaries — to cover the cost of the first stove and refill — remained outstanding, because families were not booking enough subsequent refills for the EMI recovery mechanism to function. Families had borrowed money to participate in the scheme. They then could not afford to use it. The CAG noted, further, that "inadequacy was also noticed in providing 5 kg cylinders to PMUY consumers facing affordability issue" — using the word "affordability" directly.

The state-level picture was even more alarming. Chhattisgarh recorded an average annual consumption of just 1.61 refills per PMUY connection. Madhya Pradesh recorded 2.38. Jharkhand, 2.57. These are among India's poorest and most tribal states — the states where PMUY penetration was celebrated as a success, and where the gap between connection and sustained use was widest.

The Subsidy Worked. Then It Was Cut.

Between 2019 and 2022, the government took no action on the CAG's affordability finding. Refill prices continued to rise. Average consumption remained below four cylinders per year.

In May 2022, under the pressure of rising inflation and approaching state elections, the government introduced a targeted Direct Benefit Transfer subsidy of ₹200 per cylinder for up to 12 refills annually. Consumption began to rise. By FY 2022-23, the average had reached 3.68 refills per connection. In October 2023, with assembly elections in five states imminent, the subsidy was raised to ₹300 per cylinder. By FY 2023-24, consumption had reached 3.95. By FY 2024-25, it reached 4.47 — the highest recorded average in the scheme's history.

The data confirmed what the CAG had identified in 2019: the barrier was financial, and a financial intervention could address it. When the government put money back in the bank accounts of poor women after each refill, those women bought more refills. The transition to clean fuel that PMUY had promised in 2016 was, slowly, beginning to happen.

In August 2025, the government cut the cap from 12 to nine cylinders. In June 2026, it cut it again — from nine to four. Both cuts came after consumption had risen in response to the subsidy. The most recent cut came when average consumption had reached 4.47 — just above four. The cap was set at exactly the level consumption had recently crossed, removing the support that had enabled families to cross it.

The government's stated justification — that the cap has been aligned with average consumption — uses the outcome of its own subsidy as proof that the subsidy is no longer needed at that level. It is a formulation that ensures the cap will always track poverty rather than need. Families unable to afford more than four cylinders in a year will always provide data showing average consumption of four cylinders, which will always be cited as evidence that four is sufficient.

This is the structure the government has built over ten years. In 2016, it gave 10.5 crore women a stove and called it clean cooking. It then provided no refill subsidy for six years, during which cylinder prices more than doubled and consumption remained at one-third of what a family needs to cook exclusively on LPG. It had access to a national audit that identified the problem precisely. It ignored the audit's findings for three years. It then introduced a subsidy — not as a rights-based entitlement, but as an electoral measure — and watched consumption rise in direct response. It then used that rising consumption figure, and the average it produced, as the basis for withdrawing the support that had generated it.

In August 2025, a family that had been averaging 4.47 cylinders a year had its subsidised entitlement cut to nine. In June 2026, it was cut to four. From the fifth cylinder onward, that family pays ₹942 upfront with nothing returned, at a time when the cumulative price increase over three months alone stands at ₹89. The government has not fixed the upfront cash barrier. It has not changed the DBT architecture. It has not introduced the seasonal vouchers or flexible payment mechanisms that independent researchers have recommended for years. It has reduced the number of transactions in which the barrier is temporarily offset — and labelled that reduction a reflection of reality.

The government did not cut the subsidy because the scheme failed. It cut the subsidy because the scheme was beginning to work — and that cost money.