India Government’s LPG policy: from the perspective of public health.

Government of India headed by the economist Dr. Manmohan Singh has recently made a massive price hike of LPG for both domestic use and commercial use. The policy of subsidizing LPG has gone through wide changes. Henceforth only six cylinders of domestic LPG will be available to each family at subsidized rate per year and extra cylinders will have to be purchased at more than double price. How much economics or politics are lying behind this change of policy or the protests against it is not the subject of this article. Rather let us look into the matter from a different perspective; what is the impact of this policy on public health and environment.

People who do not use LPG as cooking fuel mainly use Solid Fuels (Fire wood, animal dung, crop waste) or kerosene. But LPG is more eco-friendly and healthy than those other cooking fuels. Burning of these Solid fuels or Kerosene produces very high level of indoor air pollution with a range of health damaging pollutants (SO₂ , NO₂ etc.) including small shoot particle that penetrate deep into the lung. In poorly ventilated dwellings indoor smoke can be 100 times higher than the acceptable level regarding small particles. The victims of this type of indoor air pollution are the women and small children because they are maximum exposed to this.  What is the impact - I am just quoting from a factsheet released by WHO (World Health Organisation)-

“Nearly 2 million people a year die prematurely from illness attributable to indoor air pollution due to solid fuel use (2004 data). Among these deaths, 44% are due to pneumonia, 54% from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and 2% from lung cancer.”

Some more observation of  WHO regarding use of solid cooking fuels (Globally)-

•  Around 3 billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and leaky stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal.
• Nearly 50% of pneumonia deaths among children under five are due to particulate matter inhaled from indoor air pollution.
• More than 1 million people a year die from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) that develops due to exposure to such indoor air pollution.
• Both women and men exposed to heavy indoor smoke are 2-3 times more likely to develop COPD.

“Without a substantial change in policy, the total number of people relying on biomass fuels will increase to from today's 2.4 billion to 2.7 billion by 2030 (IEA, 2010). This will increase the number of people at risk of adverse health effects from indoor air pollution. The use of polluting fuels also poses a major burden on development.”

We have much debated over the massive price hike of LPG, but do we all know how many people in India actually have the luxury of using LPG for cooking, only 28.5% household, yes twenty eight point five percent. Here I am representing data from Census, 2011 regarding use of cooking fuels in India.

Cooking Fuels Used	Percentage of Households
	Total	Rural	Urban
Fire-wood	49.0	62.5	20.1
Crop residue	8.9	12.3	1.4
Cow-dung cake	7.9	10.9	1.7
Coal, Lignite, Charcoal	1.4	0.8	2.9
Kerosene	2.9	0.7	7.5
LPG/ PNG	28.5	11.4	65.0
Electricity	0.1	0.1	0.1
Bio-gas	0.4	0.4	0.4
Any other	0.5	0.6	0.2
No cooking	0.3	0.2	0.5
Total	100.0	100.0	100.0

It is clear from the above table that 87.2 % of rural families and 33.6% of urban families in India are still using highly pollution creating cooking fuels. The health hazards related to indoor air-pollution are more likely among the urban families as those families mainly live in slums or very congested dwellings. As a welfare state India should have taken policy to encourage people still using solid cooking fuels to switchover to LPG. But the policy taken by the present government will make serious setback in the process of switching over to LPG from solid fuels, because the families still using solid fuels, especially in urban areas, belong to economically weaker section.

It needs no knowledge of statistics to say that the families who can manage their cooking of entire year by 6 LPG cylinders only are either ultra-nuclear family where both husband and wife go for job and requires no cooking during daytime or they are using alternative cooking fuels side by side with LPG. Most often these alternative fuels are either solid fuels or kerosene. Even before the massive price hike of LPG I have seen several families using kerosene as alternative fuel to save LPG. This tendency among people is sure to grow when they have to pay more than double for a LPG cylinder.

Hence the situation is grim and it will worsen in coming days. May God save those poor and middle-class Indian women and children.