About
- The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MOPNG), introduced the ‘Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana’ (PMUY) as a flagship scheme with the objective of making clean cooking fuel such as LPG available to the rural and deprived households that were otherwise using traditional cooking fuels such as firewood, coal, cow-dung cakes etc.
- Usage of traditional cooking fuels had detrimental impacts on the health of rural women as well as on the environment.
Objectives
- Empowering women and protecting their health.
- Reducing the number of deaths in India due to unclean cooking fuel.
- Preventing young children from a significant number of acute respiratory illnesses caused due to indoor air pollution by burning fossil fuel.
Features
- The scheme provides a financial support of Rs 1600 for each LPG connection to the BPL households.
- Along with a deposit-free LPG connection, Ujjwala 2.0 will provide the first refill and a hotplate free of cost to the beneficiaries.
Benefits of PMUY
- The eligible beneficiaries receive a free LPG connection.
- The beneficiaries also receive a subsidy on the first six refills of 14.2 kg cylinders or eight refills of 5 kg cylinders.
- The beneficiaries can opt for an EMI facility to pay for the cost of the stove and the first refill.
- The beneficiaries can also join the PAHAL scheme to receive the subsidy amount directly in their bank accounts.
Phases of PMUY
Phase I
- Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) scheme was launched on May 1, 2016.
- The target under the scheme was to release 8 Crore LPG Connections to the deprived households by March 2020.
- The release of 8 Crore LPG connections under the scheme has also helped in increasing the LPG coverage from 62% on 1st May 2016 to 99.8% as on 1st April 2021.
Ujjwala 2.0
- In the Union budget for FY 21-22, provision for the release of additional 1 crore LPG connections to the eligible households by March 31, 2022.
- The target of releasing additional 1 crore LPG connections under Ujjwala 2.0 was achieved in January 2022.Subsequently, it was decided to release additional 60 lakh LPG connections under Ujjwala 2.0. OMCs have achieved the target of releasing 1.6 Crore LPG Connections under Ujjwala 2.0 on 31st December 2022.
Challenges of scheme
Low Consumption of Refills:
- Encouraging the sustained usage of LPG remains a big challenge, and low consumption of refills hindered recovery of outstanding loans disbursed under the scheme.
- The annual average refill consumption on 31th December 2018 was only 3.21.
System Anomalies:
There are deficiencies such as the issuance of connections to unintended beneficiaries, and problems with the software of the state-run oil marketing companies for identifying intended beneficiaries and inadequacies in the deduplication process.
