The deadly consequences for women of India’s gas price crisis

Inside the kitchen of Disha Sharma’s house in a small village in western Uttar Pradesh, India, the walls above her mud stove are covered with black soot as she shoves in cow dung cakes and firewood to light it. It is here she will spend most of her day, cooking at least three meals.

In the corner of the room, a modern cooking stove sits attached to a gas cylinder, under the strict proviso that it is only to be used in “emergencies”.

It’s only her watery eyes and coughing that she complains about. This is not a choice, but a necessity to manage the budget around thin earnings, says Sharma, a resident of a village in Badaun district.

“Cow dung and firewood are more easily available here than a cylinder. We want to use the gas stove as it will obviously make our lives easier. But it is very costly to use it every day,” she says.

Sharma is among more than two-thirds of India’s 1.3 billion-strong population that still continue to rely on carbon-emitting biomass and dung-based fuel for cooking, according to the UN’s latest report – a deadly practice equated to burning 400 cigarettes an hour.

Even though a majority of urban Indians now rely on cooking gas or induction stoves, they make up just 30 per cent of India’s population – for half of all rural Indians, cooking gas is still considered a “luxury” commodity.

The issue has been getting worse for some time: the cost of refilling a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder for cooking has more than doubled in the past seven years, rising from about Rs 410 (£4) in March 2014 to almost Rs 820 (about £8) in 2020 in Delhi. Similar price rises are seen across states despite their different tax systems.

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But the crunch is reaching crisis levels now, as part of a broader hike in oil and gas prices connected to the fact that the price of importing a barrel of crude oil has tripled in one year. In 2021 alone, the price of LPG has been raised four times – stretching budgets for the country’s poorest and breaking the long-held convention of upping it no more than once in a month.

“There is not even a single house in my village that is not using chulah (a mud stove). Even if I talk about 10 to 12 villages around mine, the majority are using firewood despite all the houses having gas cylinders,” says Vivek Anand, a resident of Bihar’s semi-urban Vaishali district who works as a lecturer in Kolkata.

Anand’s joint family of 25 people have no choice but to cook on firewood as the cylinder would not even last for 10 days of the month if they used it regularly, he says. “The prices have increased so much that we can hardly afford it. Refill costs Rs 925 (£9) a cylinder.”

The bit-by-bit price rises have made gas cooking off-limits for a majority of rural Indians, many of whom are daily wage earners, labourers, farmers or those with no regular income at all, according to experts.

Invariably this equates to thousands of women in the kitchen, accompanied by their young children, being exposed to harmful smoke pollution at a level far higher than acceptable annual limits.

Exposure to air pollution is responsible for over 50 per cent of premature deaths among children under five, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), suffering diseases including pneumonia, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.

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Indoor air pollution contributed to 600,000 deaths in India in 2019 alone while there were 2.31 million deaths globally, according to the State of Global Air 2020 report.

The incomplete combustion of solid fuels in cooking leads to the release of harmful gases and unburnt soot particles, consisting of PM 2.5 - particulate matter 30 times finer than human hair – which can enter the bloodstream and cause chronic health diseases.

Ashok Srinivas, an energy expert with Pune-based think tank Prayas, says not many are aware of the wider health hazards of cooking with firewood beyond its immediate and more visible effects: stinging, watery eyes and coughing.

“Mostly these women are burning solid fuels inside closed spaces which are typically not very well ventilated. The particulate pollution hangs in the hair and is inhaled by the women and even their children, causing serious problems like cataracts, pulmonary disorder and strokes,” he says.

This is the reason why India sees very high incidence rates of cataracts among its rural women, Srinivas adds.

No one disputes that using gas is much easier than repeating the cumbersome daily process of collecting twigs and wood logs or making cow dung cakes to then burn in the mud stove. But living in a country like India where there is such a stark divide between urban and rural populations, just getting a cylinder is a “struggle in itself”, says Srinivas.

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“People have to travel long distances to reach the delivery centre and incur the additional cost of transportation. It’s a vicious cycle, the delivery system is dependent on the demand and the demand suffers because of the prices and other reasons,” he says.

Delivering gas cooking through a 2016 government programme was one of the central tenets of prime minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to rural voters, and the government counts its success in the fact that 80 million cylinders have been given to people below the poverty line so far.

This has brought the possibility of clean cooking to 95 per cent of the population, the government says. But like the bold claims made of other flagship Modi schemes on sanitation and electrification, there’s a gap between the headline outreach figures and the reality for many on the ground.

There are still a lot of villages where gas cooking is limited to only about 20 to 30 per cent of households, says Nitisha Agrawal, founder of the Smokeless Cookstove Foundation, a non-profit organisation that works at the grassroots level with tribal communities in Maharashtra to provide an improved version of the traditional stove.

Owning a cylinder and using it are two very different things. Statistics by the government’s own National Family Health Survey (NFHS-V) have shown that while the number of customers for LPG has risen under the Modi government, actual consumption has increased only marginally.

“If we look at it purely from the fact that it was meant to give 80 million connections to people from that narrow point of view, it has definitely been a success,” Srinivas says. “But it has failed to solve the larger problem of rural women’s health and their ability to cook without smoke,” he adds.