Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana Has Released 10.58 Crore Deposit-Free LPG Connections to Adult Women of Poor Households Since 2016, Backed by a Rs 300 Subsidy Per Cylinder

Oil marketing companies had released 10.58 crore LPG connections under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) by 1 July 2026, according to a written statement the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas laid before the Lok Sabha on 23 July 2026. The scheme gives deposit-free cooking-gas connections to adult women from poor households, and the Prime Minister launched it on 1 May 2016 at Ballia in Uttar Pradesh. One crore is 10 million, so the count is 105.8 million connections.

The same statement puts the price a PMUY household in Delhi pays for a 14.2 kg cylinder at Rs 642, after a targeted subsidy of Rs 300. Other households pay Rs 942. Each figure below is tied to the document that gives it.

From Ballia to 10.58 crore connections

The Press Information Bureau (PIB) factsheet of 2 November 2021 says the scheme’s target was widened from 5 crore families to 8 crore, and that Rs 8,000 crore was allotted at first, with Rs 4,800 crore added later. The 8 crore mark was reached in September 2019. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), in a 2019 audit summarised by PRS Legislative Research, recorded the original deadline as March 2020.

Ujjwala 2.0 began in August 2021 to reach the remaining poor households. Its first target, 1 crore more connections, was met in January 2022. Another 60 lakh followed by December 2022, which made 1.60 crore under Ujjwala 2.0 and 9.60 crore overall. The government then approved 75 lakh more for 2023-24 to 2025-26, finished in July 2024, and later approved 25 lakh further connections for 2025-26 to clear pending applications. By 1 July 2026 those had been released, the Lok Sabha statement says, which gives the total of 10.58 crore.

The government paid Rs 1,600 per connection for the first 9.60 crore, Rs 2,200 for the next 75 lakh and Rs 2,050 for the last 25 lakh. That money covers the cylinder’s security deposit, the pressure regulator, the Suraksha safety hose, the consumer booklet and installation. Since Ujjwala 2.0, the first refill and a stove have also been free. Migrant families can apply on a self-declaration instead of a ration card and proof of address. PIB’s December 2025 release says the eligibility test has been simplified to an adult woman from a poor household who submits a Deprivation Declaration.

Where the connections are

Five states hold the largest counts as of 1 July 2026. Uttar Pradesh has 1.90 crore connections, West Bengal 1.24 crore, Bihar 1.21 crore, Madhya Pradesh 0.90 crore and Rajasthan 0.75 crore. Together that is about 6.00 crore, roughly 57 per cent of the total (a tuput calculation from the statement’s table).

The supply side grew too. The statement counts 25,611 LPG distributorships on 1 July 2026, of which 17,685 serve rural areas. PIB’s nine-year note gives 13,896 distributors on 1 April 2014. Oil companies commissioned 8,045 distributorships between April 2016 and June 2026, and 7,452 of them, 93 per cent, serve rural areas. Every distributor except those in the hard-to-reach “Durgam Kshetriya” category must deliver cylinders to the home.

The Rs 300 subsidy and how it changed

Two prices apply to a cylinder. Every household pays a retail price that the government holds below the market-determined price, and PMUY households receive a further targeted subsidy. According to the Cabinet release of 8 August 2025, the government began a targeted subsidy of Rs 200 per 14.2 kg cylinder for up to 12 refills a year in May 2022 and raised it to Rs 300 in October 2023. For 2025-26 the Cabinet approved Rs 300 for up to nine refills a year, at Rs 12,000 crore. A 5 kg connection gets the same support in proportion.

The release gives the reason: India imports about 60 per cent of its LPG, and the subsidy is meant to shield PMUY households from sharp swings in international prices. PTI reported in June 2026 that the money is credited to bank accounts after each refill. Our article on Jan Dhan Yojana covers how that account base grew.

Keeping cylinders flowing in the 2026 gas crisis

The Lok Sabha statement describes what the 2026 conflict in the Middle East did to supply. Before February 2026 India imported about 60 per cent of its LPG, and about 90 per cent of that passed through the Strait of Hormuz. After the strait closed, the government raised domestic LPG output from 34 to 54 thousand tonnes a day and prioritised household use. More than 56 crore domestic cylinders were delivered between March and June 2026, the statement says, including more than 12 crore to Ujjwala families.

Prices followed the import benchmark. The Saudi Contract Price rose to US$796 a tonne in June 2026, and the market-determined price of a 14.2 kg cylinder reached Rs 1,695. The retail price was held at Rs 942, an under-recovery (the gap between cost and selling price) of more than Rs 700 a cylinder in June and more than Rs 500 in July. For PMUY households the Rs 300 subsidy comes on top.

What household air pollution does, by the WHO’s count

The WHO’s fact sheet, updated on 16 December 2025, says about 2.1 billion people still cook with solid fuels or kerosene on open fires or inefficient stoves. It attributes 2.9 million deaths in 2021 to household air pollution, including more than 309,000 children under five, and says women and children carry the largest share of the burden.

For India, the India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative estimated in The Lancet Planetary Health that household air pollution caused 0.61 million deaths in 2019. The death rate from it fell by 64.2 per cent between 1990 and 2019, the same paper reports. Air pollution of all kinds accounted for 1.67 million deaths in India that year.

What the evaluations of PMUY found

Two evaluations are cited in the ministry’s reply. IIT Kanpur, working for the National Health Systems Resource Centre of the health ministry, surveyed 2,366 households in Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal and put low-cost sensors in villages for three months. It found that 1,716 of them, more than 72 per cent, used LPG as their primary fuel. Among those LPG users, more than 40 per cent reported better general health for the person who cooks, and 55 per cent reported fewer episodes of respiratory illness in the family. The report says reported respiratory illness in the Rajasthan village with the most PMUY connections was 1.2 per cent, against 19.2 per cent in the village with the fewest. The Lok Sabha statement adds that the evaluation, carried out in 2023, measured indoor air quality during cooking hours as nearly twice as good in households using LPG as in households using low LPG or a traditional chulha.

A NITI Aayog evaluation released in April 2026 found, as the statement reports it, that 74.27 per cent of beneficiaries surveyed saw less indoor air pollution after taking up LPG, and about 80.78 per cent saw less cough and breathlessness. ThePrint, reporting the government’s reply, added that the same evaluation put the share of PMUY households using LPG as their main cooking fuel at 86.59 per cent.

The health findings in the IIT Kanpur and NITI Aayog studies are what households reported in surveys. A randomised trial that measured outcomes directly, the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) trial, gave 3,200 pregnant women in India, Guatemala, Peru and Rwanda either an LPG stove with fuel or continued biomass cooking. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2024. Median postnatal PM2.5 exposure was 24.2 micrograms per cubic metre in the LPG group against 66.0 in the biomass group. Severe pneumonia in the first year of life did not differ significantly, at 5.67 cases per 100 child-years with LPG and 6.06 without, and the authors concluded that LPG stoves did not reduce it.

Clean cooking fuel in the national surveys

The fifth National Family Health Survey, run by the International Institute for Population Sciences, found 58.6 per cent of households using clean fuel for cooking in 2019-21, up from 43.8 per cent in 2015-16. The fact sheet splits the 2019-21 figure into 89.7 per cent in cities and 43.2 per cent in villages. A 2020 study in Nature Energy by researchers at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water and Columbia University followed rural households in six states, and LPG use in the sample rose from 22 per cent in 2014-15 to 58 per cent in 2018. The authors found that 43 per cent of the households that had newly acquired LPG by 2018 got it through PMUY.

How often households come back for a refill

A connection counts as a start. The ministry’s number for the ongoing use is the annual average per connection, in 14.2 kg cylinders. PIB gives 3.01 for 2019-20 and 3.95 for 2023-24, and the Lok Sabha statement gives 3.68 for 2021-22 and 4.71 for 2025-26. The Cabinet release of August 2025 places 3.68 in 2022-23, so the year differs between two official documents. PIB also reported that 8.34 crore of the 8.99 crore connections released by 1 April 2022, about 93 per cent, took at least one refill in the two years to March 2024, and that about 1.3 per cent of consumers had taken no refill since installation as of 1 July 2025.

Earlier counts were lower. The CAG audit covering May 2016 to December 2018 found PMUY households averaging 3.9 refills in 2016-17, 3.4 in 2017-18 and 3.0 in 2018-19, against 6.7 to 7.5 for other consumers. The auditors recommended shifting the scheme’s focus from issuing connections to sustained use. The Nature Energy study found that PMUY households had lower odds than general customers of using LPG as their primary fuel (odds ratio 0.64) or exclusively (0.56).

Independent counts use different tests. FactChecker’s 2023 analysis of ministry data found that 9.6 per cent of beneficiaries took no refill in 2021-22 and 56.5 per cent took four or fewer, and cited a 2020 Council on Energy, Environment and Water study putting the need of a household that cooks only on LPG at seven cylinders a year. Down To Earth reported on 1 June 2026 that about 14 per cent of connections were classed as inactive in 2024-25, meaning no refill in the previous year. It quoted an unnamed senior petroleum ministry official as saying refill rates are especially low among PMUY beneficiaries and that high upfront costs are the main deterrent. The ministry’s statement lists food habits, household size, tradition, taste, price and the availability of other fuels among the factors. ThePrint reported that the government acknowledged “fuel stacking”, where a household keeps wood or dung cakes for some dishes alongside LPG.

The subsidy limit from June 2026

On 8 June 2026 an Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas told a news briefing that the Rs 300 subsidy now applies to the first four refills a year instead of nine, PTI reported. That sets the most a household can receive in a year at Rs 1,200, down from Rs 2,700 (a tuput calculation). He said the new entitlement “broadly matches the average annual consumption of Ujjwala beneficiaries.” The official’s other reasons were a supply cost above Rs 1,600 a cylinder, a rise of about 46 per cent in the Saudi Contract Price since February, and oil companies losing about Rs 700 on each cylinder.

A written Lok Sabha reply, as ThePrint reported it on 24 July 2026, says the change applies only to subsidised refills and puts no restriction on buying more at market prices. The Prime Minister’s post of 1 May 2026, ten years to the day after the launch, said: “The focus now is on sustained use, affordability and ensuring energy justice.”