Babita Maurya, a 45-year-old mother, shoves firewood into her challah in her tin-tarp shanty in the Roshanpura slums of Bhopal. “The wood is damp, it’s monsoon, you see. The house will fill with smoke now,” she says as she begins to prepare lunch for the family of 11.<\/p>\n
There’s a cooking gas cylinder in the shanty. It’s empty.<\/p>\n
“Gas is far too expensive now. I need at least two cylinders a month for my family, which will cost Rs 2,200. The last time I got the cylinder refilled was around 2-3 months ago. Now, since we do not have money, I am cooking with firewood. I’ll get a refill when we save enough,” she says.<\/p>\n
Babita is not alone. Over 1.18 crore Ujjwala beneficiaries across the country have not refilled even a single cylinder in a year, and around 1.5 crore have managed to refill it only once in the entire fiscal.<\/p>\n
This is revealed in RTI replies given by IOCL, BPCL and HPCL. Around 9.58 crore cylinders have been issued countrywide under the scheme. Among non-Ujjwala consumers, 1.84 crore people have not refilled even once in the year 2022-23 fiscal, the companies have said in RTI replies to Neemuch-based activist Chandra Shekhar Gaur.<\/p>\n
IOCL reply says: “Out of 4.54 crore connections released by IOCL under PMUY, about 87 lakh consumers have not taken any refill during the FY 2022-23.”. HPCL’s response to Gaur says that 6.46 lakh PMUY consumers have not refilled their cylinders in the 2022-23 fiscal and that just over 40.1 lakh took one refill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Babita Maurya, a 45-year-old mother, shoves firewood into her challah in her tin-tarp shanty in the Roshanpura slums of Bhopal. “The wood is damp, it’s monsoon, you see. The house will fill with smoke now,” she says as she begins to prepare lunch for the family of 11. There’s a cooking gas cylinder in the shanty. It’s empty. “Gas is far too expensive now. I need at least two cylinders a month for my family, which will cost Rs 2,200. The last time I got the cylinder refilled was around 2-3 months ago. Now, since we do not have money, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}