Deadly smoke set to return as India cuts outlays on cooking gas program

Five years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government offered Indian women a chance to dramatically improve their lives with cooking fuel subsidies in what became one of his administration’s most celebrated campaigns.

Now, hamstrung by a widening fiscal deficit, New Delhi has been slowly reducing the size of those handouts — a shift that risks upsetting women voters and potentially exposing millions to heavier levels of pollution.

In Allauddinnagar, a village in Uttar Pradesh, Laxmi Kishore, a 35-year-old homemaker, is worried. Cooking food for her family used to be an ordeal that involved using cheap fuels like cow dung, crops and wood, which burn with a sooty flame and left her teary eyed and choking. When Modi’s program made liquefied petroleum gas cylinders affordable to her some years ago, she breathed more easily.