SHEOPUR (MADHYA PRADESH): It is midday and smoke billows from Ramoli’s shanty in Kalmi, a village in Madhya Pradesh’s Sheopur district, one of the most backward in the country. The smoke is the result of Ramoli’s cooking. She is using firewood to prepare food for her family of five even though there is an LPG stove next to her mud-baked chulha (fireplace) and a gas cylinder perched on the roof of her outdoor toilet.
Asked why she was not using LPG to cook, Ramoli said hesitatingly: “It’s not that we never use the cylinder. We use it sometimes but for a few months it has been lying there.” Prodded further, she responded: “Where will I get the money from (to refill the cylinder)? We generally pick firewood from nearby areas and sell it. This fetches us less than Rs 7,000 a month. How can I spend Rs 900-1,000 on a cylinder?”
Ramoli got an LPG connection about a year ago under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana and for some time stopped using firewood for cooking. But she is back to cooking food with firewood or dung. Her story is repeated in the nearby Goras village. A gas stove lies at a corner of Rama’s house with heaps of utensils on it, obviously out of disuse, while a weather-beaten LPG cylinder stands in the courtyard.
“We use it (cooking gas) only when we are in a hurry to cook because of guests. We use it mainly for making tea and snacks,” she said. Maan Singh, another villager, explained why they find it more convenient to cook using firewood instead of LPG.
“We visit nearby forests to pick herbs and firewood and make a living out of it. The firewood we pick for selling is also used for cooking, this doesn’t cost us anything,” he said.
Sheopur was brought in the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana map about a year ago. Inhabited mostly by the Sahariya tribe, Sheopur is one of the country’s 250 most backward districts.
Pawan Soni, general secretary of the Federation of LPG Distributors of India, admitted that many beneficiaries had not refilled their LPG cylinders.