The Cylinder Comes Up the Stairs, the Subsidy Goes to the Bank — Epoche B1
In most Indian homes cooking gas arrives as a steel cylinder of about fourteen kilos, booked by phone or app and carried up the stairs on one man's shoulder. Ramesh has delivered them in the same Pune streets for nine years. Follow one cylinder for us. The booking reaches the distributor, and in the morning it is on my list. Twenty-five, thirty houses in a day. I check the seal before I hand it over, and the customer reads me the code that came to her phone, so the company knows the right house received it. Then the cash. Then four floors down, and the next one. And the subsidy? Nothing happens at the door. The price I collect is the full price. If the household is entitled to help, the money goes into their bank account afterwards. People still ask me to take it off the bill. I cannot. One of his customers, Sunita, fills in the rest of the story. Her connection came free under the government scheme for poor households, and she remembers the day the stove arrived. "Getting it was easy," she says. In the monsoon, when her husband's work stops, a refill is a decision rather than a purchase. She buys one cylinder, makes it last, and cooks the rest on wood collected behind the houses. That is the whole shape of the problem, told by two people on the same staircase. A connection is a one-off, and it can be counted. A refill comes back every few weeks, and it is the refill, not the stove, that decides what a family cooks on. References Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (2015). PAHAL (DBTL): Direct Benefit Transfer of LPG Subsidy. Government of India. Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (2016). Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana: Guidelines. Government of India.