Beyond Connections: Is India's PMUY Delivering a Just Clean Cooking Transition?

India's Clean Cooking Revolution: A National Triumph, a Regional Challenge

Launched in 2016, India's Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) stands as a monumental welfare initiative aimed at revolutionizing clean cooking access. With the stated objective of empowering women by mitigating health risks and time loss associated with traditional biomass fuels, PMUY has undeniably made significant strides. By April 2025, the scheme is reported to have facilitated 10.33 crore LPG connections, with per capita consumption rising impressively from 3.01 cylinders in 2019-20 to 4.43 in 2024-25. These figures mark a crucial step towards achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 7 for universal access to modern energy.

However, beneath these impressive national statistics lies a complex reality of persistent regional disparities and challenges in sustained use. While PMUY's implementation has seen greater success in India's northern, western, and southern regions, eastern states and the North Eastern Region (NER) continue to lag significantly. Research indicates a clear social gradient in access to essential services like home delivery of LPG refills, with Scheduled Tribe (ST) households reporting the lowest rates compared to other social categories. These constraints are particularly acute in the NER, where geographical remoteness and socio-economic factors exacerbate both initial access and the crucial challenge of sustained LPG use.

The Lens of Energy Justice: Beyond Mere Access

The patterns observed in PMUY's implementation compel us to ask a fundamental question: Is expanding LPG connections enough to constitute a just clean cooking transition? A truly just transition demands evaluation not just on numbers, but on principles of equity and inclusiveness. Energy justice shifts the focus from mere availability of modern energy to examining who truly benefits, who is left behind, and under what social, spatial, and institutional conditions. This framework is essential for assessing whether policies like PMUY enable equitable and meaningful use across diverse populations.

A just transition encompasses three critical dimensions:

• Distributive Justice: Ensuring fair allocation of benefits and burdens.
• Procedural Justice: Guaranteeing inclusive and participatory decision-making processes.
• Recognition Justice: Acknowledging and respecting diverse social contexts, identities, and needs.

While aggregate LPG coverage reflects national progress, the marked regional variations in PMUY's impact point to a significant lack of inclusivity in the realization of its benefits. This concern is particularly salient in the geographically remote and historically marginalized NER, where unique infrastructural, socio-economic, and sociocultural contexts profoundly shape local energy landscapes, rendering these regions structurally more energy-vulnerable.

PMUY in the North East: A Case Study in Justice Failure

The NER presents a revealing context for assessing the justice implications of India's clean cooking transitions. National Family Health Survey-5 data shows that 54% of households in the NER still rely on biomass for cooking, significantly higher than the national average of 40.6%. Despite this high level of energy deprivation and a substantial ST population (a primary target group for PMUY), the region accounts for a mere 6.8% of PMUY LPG connections – the second-lowest share nationally. This discrepancy is not merely an implementation gap; it signals a deeper justice failure when exclusion is systematically patterned along axes of geographical and historical marginalization.

Distributive Injustice: Uneven Benefits on the Ground

In the NER, PMUY's nationally uniform delivery model has produced starkly uneven outcomes. Geographical remoteness, thin energy markets, and infrastructural constraints create a structural form of distributive injustice. Limited local administrative support and persistent information deficits systematically disadvantage women with low literacy, restricted mobility, or weak social networks, preventing formal eligibility from translating into effective entitlement. Even when connections are secured, inequities persist at the refill stage. Poor mobile connectivity, low digital literacy, and the absence of reliable home delivery force women to transport cylinders through difficult terrain, incurring physical strain and additional costs. This inflates the effective price of LPG, making a subsidized fuel costly and unreliable for remote households. Weak regulatory oversight further enables informal intermediaries to control bookings and prioritize select customers, exacerbating the problem.

Procedural Injustice: Silenced Voices and Invisible Realities

Centrally designed initiatives like PMUY often lack mechanisms for meaningful local participation, risking the oversight of region-specific constraints. In the NER, the absence of institutionalized channels for incorporating local governance inputs and community feedback has reduced the scheme's responsiveness to its unique challenges. This procedural exclusion is compounded by the region's limited visibility in policy discourse and empirical research, which often focuses on mainland plains, failing to capture the compounded risks faced by remote hill areas. Data limitations, such as the outdated Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011 used for eligibility, further weaken procedural fairness by constraining accurate targeting. Even performance audits, like that by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in 2019, largely excluded the NER, limiting accountability and adaptive governance.

Recognition Injustice: One-Size-Fits-All Blind Spots

PMUY's standardized design often fails to recognize the distinctive sociocultural practices, livelihood dependencies, and climatic conditions prevalent in the NER. The multifunctional use of firewood – for cooking, heating, food preservation, and other household production – is not merely a cultural preference but an adaptive response to infrastructural scarcity, market unreliability, and income constraints. PMUY, however, assumes a uniform LPG-centric cooking model, overlooking these material realities. Chronic electricity shortages limit alternative heating options, compelling households to rely on traditional hearths for both cooking and space heating, especially in cold, high-altitude, and high-rainfall settings. Consequently, LPG is often used as a supplementary fuel, with households rationing use over several months. This continued reliance on firewood in tribal regions reflects a complex interaction between traditional embeddedness and structural limitations, a nuance that policy misalignment often fails to recognize, thereby limiting the transformative potential of clean cooking interventions.

Towards a Truly Just Transition: Policy Implications

While PMUY has significantly expanded LPG access nationally, the experiences of the North Eastern Region highlight a critical disconnect between headline coverage and ground realities. The persistence of biomass use in the region is not a simple implementation failure or a matter of household preference; it is shaped by enduring structural, spatial, and institutional constraints that remain inadequately addressed within the scheme's current design and delivery. Expanding access without ensuring sustained, affordable, and context-sensitive use risks perpetuating existing inequalities rather than alleviating them.

To achieve a truly just clean cooking transition, several policy implications emerge:

• Regionally Adaptive Models: Clean cooking strategies must move beyond one-size-fits-all designs towards delivery models that reflect local geographical, socio-economic, infrastructural, and market realities.
• Strengthened Last-Mile Delivery: Enabling sustained use must be central to policy success, requiring robust last-mile delivery and reliable refill systems.
• Complementary Infrastructure: Investing in supportive infrastructure, such as dependable electricity access, offers a win-win pathway, enhancing LPG intervention effectiveness while addressing broader energy service deficits.
• Embedding Local Knowledge: Systematically integrating local knowledge and lived experiences into policy design and evaluation is crucial for advancing both recognition and procedural justice, ensuring equitable outcomes in practice, not just in intent.

PMUY represents an important step, but its justice claims remain fragile when assessed from the margins. The NER illustrates that without dedicated attention to regional inequalities, energy transitions risk becoming uneven. Ensuring that clean cooking policies are not only inclusive in intent but just in outcome remains a critical challenge for India's energy transition agenda.