It took India a decade to connect 10.41 crore households to clean cooking fuel. It’s taking three weeks to push them back to smoke.
Since the Strait of Hormuz closure cut off up to 90% of India’s LPG imports, the country’s worst gas crisis has triggered something no headline captures: an environmental reversal. In Kerala, timber yards are running dry. In Maharashtra, cow dung cake sales are surging. Households that hadn’t touched biomass fuels in years are going back.
The Health Cost No One’s Counting
Even before the crisis, 41% of Indians used biomass for cooking — producing 340 million tonnes of CO2 annually. That baseline is now climbing. And CO2 isn’t the scariest part.
Biomass releases PM2.5 particles that penetrate lungs and bloodstream. The WHO links household air pollution to heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. The primary victims: women who cook — the same women the Ujjwala scheme was built to protect.
The government’s fix? 48,000 kilolitres of extra kerosene and a one-month exemption letting restaurants burn biomass. But India slashed kerosene production 87% over the past decade. The backup fuel barely exists.
The Trap No One Planned
Here’s the irony. Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana pushed LPG coverage past 95% — 33 crore connections. A genuine public health win. But it also made the entire country dependent on a single imported fuel, 60% of which flows through one chokepoint.
Induction cooktops are selling out in cities. But for rural India — where electric infrastructure is patchy and 58.5% of working women are in agriculture — the fallback isn’t a sleek cooktop. It’s the smoke-filled kitchen they just escaped.
Experts call this “temporary.” But household air pollution doesn’t wait for tankers. Every week of biomass cooking adds to a toll measured in lung disease — not logistics.