LPG subsidy is available only for limited beneficiaries and the rest of the users will have to pay the market price, Oil Secretary Pankaj Jain has said. He added that no subsidy is paid on cooking gas since June 2020 and the only subsidy that is provided is the one that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in March.
Who Will Get LPG Subsidy?
The LPG subsidy on cooking gas is available for only nine crore poor women and other beneficiaries who got free connections under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. “There was no subsidy for LPG users since the early days of Covid. Since then the only subsidy is one which had been introduced now for Ujjwala beneficiaries,” Jain has said.
Recently, while announcing the subsidy decision, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in a tweet said, “We will give a subsidy of Rs 200 per gas cylinder (up to 12 cylinders) to over nine crore beneficiaries of Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. This will help our mothers and sisters. This will have a revenue implication of around Rs 6,100 crore a year.”
Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana: The scheme was introduced in May 2016 with an objective to make clean cooking fuels, such as LPG, available to the rural and deprived households which were otherwise using traditional cooking fuels such as firewood, coal and cow-dung cakes. Usage of traditional cooking fuels had detrimental impacts on the health of rural women as well as on the environment.
More than 9.17 crore LPG connections have been released under the scheme, according to the PMUY’s website. The country has nearly 30.5 crore LPG connections.
Those eligible to get an LPG connection under the scheme include adult woman belonging to SC households, ST households, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Gramin), most-backward classes, Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), tea and ex-tea garden tribes, forest dwellers, people residing in islands and river islands, SECC households (AHL TIN), poor household as per 14-point declaration. The applicant must have attained 18 years of age. There should not be any other LPG connections in the same household.
How Much Subsidy Will You Get?
Before the announcement of the subsidy, all LPG users including Ujjwala Yojana beneficiaries bought LPG cylinders at a market rate after the subsidy was discontinued in June 2020. A 14.2-kg LPG cylinder costs Rs 1,003 at market price in the national capital. Now, after the latest government decision, for Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana beneficiaries, a subsidy of Rs 200 per cylinder will be directly credited to their bank accounts and the effective price for them would be Rs 803 per 14.2-kg cylinder.
How Much Will It Cost Govt?
The LPG subsidy for Ujjwala beneficiaries will have a revenue implication of around Rs 6,100 crore a year. The government ended subsidies on petrol in June 2010 and on diesel in November 2014. The same on kerosene ended a couple of years later. And now, subsidies on LPG for most have effectively been ended. However, unlike petrol, diesel and kerosene, there is no formal order ending the subsidies.
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