9 years of ‘Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana’, crores of lives were better than clean fuel in the country
New Delhi:
The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MOPNG) had launched Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) with the aim of providing clean cooking fuel like LPG to rural and disadvantaged families, which are completing 9 years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi started this scheme on 1 May 2016 from Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh. The use of traditional cooking fuel has harmful effects on the health of rural women as well as the environment. In such a situation, this scheme has become a boon for those rural and deprived families, which used to use firewood, wood, coal, cow dung as fuel for cooking.
Promotion of women empowerment with environment
The objective of PMUY is to provide LPG connections without deposits to adult women of poor families. With this scheme, the central government is promoting health, environmental protection and women empowerment. Let us tell you that in the first phase of PMUY scheme, a target was to issue 8 crore LPG connections to the disadvantaged families by March 2020. However, this goal was achieved prematurely. PM Modi handed over the 8 millionth LPG connection in Aurangabad, Maharashtra on 7 September 2019. In order to provide help to the remaining poor families through this scheme, the government launched the second phase ‘Ujjwala 2.0’ in August 2021. In the second phase of the scheme ‘Ujjwala 2.0’, the migrant families were targeted for additional allocation of 1.6 crore LPG connections under the PMUY scheme with special facilities.
The target number of connections under ‘Ujjwala 2.0’ was achieved during December 2022, thus the total connections under the scheme increased to 9.6 crores. Apart from this, the Government of India has approved the issue of additional 75 lakh connections under the PMUY scheme, due to which the total target under the scheme has now increased to 10.35 crores.
More than 10 crore connections are present
According to government data, 10.33 crore PMUY connections exist across India till March 1 this year. Apart from this, out of 8.99 crore connections released till 1 April 2022, 8.34 crore beneficiaries have availed at least one refill during the last two financial year between April 2022 and March 2024.
(This news has not been edited by the NDTV team. It has been published directly from the syndicate feed.)
