Rising LPG Prices Drive Rural India Back to Firewood Despite Connections

Field reporting across Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh finds that women in forest-fringed villages continue to collect firewood daily despite holding LPG connections, as rising cylinder prices and unreliable refills make clean fuel unaffordable. Access on paper has not translated into sustained LPG use among low-income rural households.

In villages such as Chirai Dongri and Tintni, nestled in forested areas of Madhya Pradesh, LPG connections distributed under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana scheme have not displaced dependence on biomass fuels. Women continue to trek into forests daily to gather twigs and branches, citing the high and unpredictable cost of LPG refills, irregular supply chains and insufficient household income as primary barriers. Reporting from February 2026 found this pattern repeated consistently across multiple villages in two states.

The persistence of fuelwood use among households that formally hold LPG connections reflects a structural gap in India's clean cooking transition. Subsidies have not kept pace with fuel price inflation, and many women who nominally have access to LPG still bear the physical and health burden of cooking over open biomass fires. Indoor air pollution from solid fuel combustion remains a leading cause of respiratory disease among rural women and children in India.

Experts argue that achieving a genuine clean cooking transition requires not just connection distribution but sustained subsidy support, affordable refill logistics and reliable income pathways for rural households. As the West Asia energy crisis drives up LPG import costs, the risk of further slippage increases. Policymakers face pressure to revisit the subsidy architecture under Ujjwala and develop complementary programmes that address the affordability gap directly.

Key figure — 15 villages surveyed across Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh