A hike most cruel

The hike in price of domestic cooking gas cylinder by Rs 50 comes as a cruel blow for the nearly 30 crore domestic consumers, most of whom cannot think of any other fuel option for their daily needs of cooking. With the latest increase, the normal cylinder prices are just about to touch the four figure mark. In fact what remains from a thousand rupees after paying the billed amount, will be inadequate for the tips due to the delivery boy towards the services rendered!

The hike was predictable and there is no surprise that it follows the results of the Assembly election in five states. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav had in fact warned the people of the jolt to be administered by the Union government. The consumers will now be shelling out Rs. 949 for a 14.2 kg cylinder in Delhi while it will be Rs. 987 in Lucknow and around the same in several other state capitals. The petrol and diesel prices too have gone up by 80 paise a litre. With elections completed, the Union Government is back to revision, mainly upward, of the commodities so essential for running kitchens and the vehicles meant for daily commuting.

The LPG prices were last revised on October 6 last year. Between July and October 2021, they had gone up by close to Rs 100 a cylinder. The Union Government had come under severe criticism for the hikes during the pandemic and the Lockdowns which had rendered lakhs of people jobless. It was only then that the Government put a freeze on LPG and fuel prices. The current hike could be easily termed as a fallout of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Drone fired bombing on oil installations in Saudi Arabia too is causing jitters in the oil market.

Thanks to public memory being proverbially short, most domestic consumers have forgotten that they were getting a substantial subsidy on their cylinder purchase through the Central Government’s DBTL (Direct Benefit Transfer or LPG or PAHAL (Pratyaksh Hanstantarit Labh) scheme. It was launched by the UPA Government on June 1, 2013. The subsidy amount ceased to be remitted in accounts of the consumers from May 2020 without any announcement to the effect from the Government. The Central dispensation had created the UIDAI and Aadhaar infrastructure at a huge cost for the subsidy to be directly transferred to consumers’ accounts. No one knows what happened to the scheme which mandated bank accounts to be mandatorily linked to the Aadhaar.

The current hike is all likely to force the poor urban residents to look for other fuel options, most of which would only be carbon-emitting. But rural households would switch to firewood, cow dung cakes or stubble burning, all of which are hazardous to the health of womenfolk and residents of small homes. It is certainly not the achche din the Prime Minister has been promising but failing to deliver.