Lighting up Lives through Cooking Gas and Transforming Society

The case recounts a significant attempt at social transformation through a simple mechanism of providing cooking gas to the marginalised in society. Targeting about 100 million households in India that still use dung cakes, firewood and coal as the primary fuel for cooking, the government conceived the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY)1 to replace these traditional fuels with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), a clean fuel. At the time of the launch of the scheme on May 1, 2016, the government increased the initial target of providing 50 million below poverty line (BPL) families with LPG to 80 million by 2019–20. The scheme had already covered more than 30 million families by January 2018.