A flame the state cannot guarantee

India’s LPG crisis that began in March 2026, following the war in West Asia, has sparked familiar diagnoses: disrupted Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes, heavy import dependence, and inadequate storage. These observations are accurate as far as they go. What these fail to explain is why a decade-long welfare programme, which connected 32.83 crore households to clean cooking fuel, offered almost no protection to these households when a single chokepoint was disrupted. The supply chain describes the trigger; the welfare architecture explains why it hit so hard — and that is the more consequential question.

The welfare programme, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, has provided 10.33 crore connections to women from below-poverty-line households since 2016, more than doubling national LPG coverage over a decade. The ambition was genuine and the relief measurable. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) found that women saved about an hour in a day on cooking and cleaning after accessing LPG — a real difference for millions who had spent generations cooking on biomass.

Imperfections in a transition

The problem is not what PMUY delivered but what it quietly replaced. Before LPG, kerosene arrived through the Public Distribution System. Inefficient and leaky, it was a command-distribution system where the state held physical stock and the ration card determined access. When the government phased out PDS kerosene and enrolled households into LPG as a clean energy upgrade, it was also withdrawing from direct supply responsibility. By 2024, 13 States had become kerosene-free and millions of households depended on a globalised commodity market that the state does not control. The transition substituted imperfect but directly administered supply for higher-quality market supply, without asking what would happen when that market failed. India imports about 60% of its LPG consumption and 90% of those imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. India’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves cover about 9.5 days of crude oil supply and are currently at 64% capacity, with no equivalent LPG-specific buffer. The state’s ability to meet its clean cooking targets depends entirely on uninterrupted global commodity flows, while the welfare architecture — designed to scale uptake — was not built to ensure continuity under stress.

Gaps in a sovereign responsibility

The PMUY promise was built on visible markers of sovereign responsibility. Government branding on the cylinder, the Direct Benefit Transfer credit in the woman’s account, and the scheme’s naming after the Prime Minister — all signalling that the state was present and accountable. The war in West Asia and the LPG crisis exposes that communication and capacity were never aligned. The branding belonged to the state while the supply chain moved through markets and chokepoints that the state observed from a distance once the transition to LPG was complete. But when the Strait of Hormuz closes, the sovereign guarantee has no physical infrastructure behind it.

The cost of that misalignment is not distributed neutrally. One in four PMUY beneficiaries took only one refill or none at all in normal times, because refill costs exceeded what the subsidy covered for the poorest quintiles. With mandatory booking gaps at 45 days for rural areas and 25 days for urban areas and prices rising by ₹60 a cylinder in March, those households are the first to revert to biomass and the last to receive any relief when allocations tighten. Scheduled Caste and tribal households have 10% to 30% lower LPG access than upper-caste households, independent of income, partly because distributor networks in segregated rural geographies replicate caste hierarchies in how they allocate scarce supply. A war in West Asia activates those hierarchies.

The gendered dimension of this design flaw is equally structural. The scheme made women the formal beneficiaries of an entitlement while leaving its actual delivery entirely outside their control. The IISD found that in 74% of surveyed households, women made decisions on cooking energy sources. When LPG prices rose sharply, 14% said they would revert to biomass, leaving women to manage the shift without institutional support. Access framed as liberation from drudgery quietly restores it when supply fails and women carry that burden without institutional recourse.

None of this requires starting over. A two-month strategic LPG buffer, a statutory minimum of imports routed outside the Strait of Hormuz, and publicly available crisis protocols are design measures the current system has never implemented. Community biogas under Galvanizing Organic Bio-Agro Resources Dhan (GOBARdhan) with the Indian Biogas Association proposing a ₹10,000 per unit revival subsidy for five million dormant plants alongside accelerated piped gas for dense urban areas, provides targeted redundancy for the most exposed. A serious welfare architecture does not replace its primary delivery system when it comes under stress. Instead, it builds the redundancy underneath so that the stress never reaches the household.

In perspective

The deeper problem is that a decade of welfare expansion measured success in connections delivered and treated continuity under stress as a problem for another day. An entitlement that holds only in undisturbed markets is not durable by any standard worth defending. India extended clean cooking to hundreds of millions of its people and called it transformation. The question the war is now forcing is whether transformation built on unbroken global supply chains, without buffers, without triage rules and without alternatives, can honestly be called a guarantee at all.

Rahul Verma is an independent researcher and sociology educator