Company News
The subsidy on liquefied petroleum gas (cooking gas) cylinders for India's newly-connected 73 million poor households should be increased enough to limit the cost of a cylinder to 4% of a household’s monthly expenditure, according to a study.The subsidy should only be provided to poor households, and the wealthy should be removed from the beneficiaries list, according to the June 15, 2019, policy brief titled “Ujjwala 2.0” by Collaborative Clean Air Policy Centre (CCAPC), a multi-organisational initiative.
With these two changes the central government’s Ujjwala scheme can help poor families make cooking gas their primary cooking fuel, and not burn firewood and cow dung, the easily available biomass fuels, the policy brief stated.
By distributing 73 million connections (as on July 14, 2019), the Ujjwala scheme has met 91.25% of its target of 80 million connections to poor households by 2020. This is a 35-percentage-point rise since 2014. However, despite the soaring consumer numbers, cooking gas consumption rose by just 0.8% over two years to 2017, and the number of customers increased by 6%, IndiaSpend reported on April 22, 2019.
Beneficiaries under the Ujjwala scheme have only bought 3.4 refills per capita annually, according to government data. For these households to completely switch to cooking gas, at least nine cylinders are required per year, according to the CCAPC brief.
Ujjwala beneficiaries have not switched completely to cooking gas because the refills are expensive. Around 85% of Ujjwala beneficiaries in rural Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh--where two-fifths of India’s ...Read More
No comments:
Post a Comment