India’s huge plan to give poor women clean cooking gas didn't change how they cooked, but it accidentally made them way more financially independent.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Impact of cooking fuel connection subsidies on women outcomes: Evidence from India’s gender-responsive clean energy policy
SSRN · 6461366
The Takeaway
While most households continued using wood fires because gas was too expensive, the mere act of putting the gas accounts in women's names significantly increased their mobility and decision-making power. It suggests that formal inclusion in a system is more empowering than the actual service being provided.
From the abstract
This paper examines the impact of India's Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a clean-cooking policy that offered free Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) connections to women from economically and socially disadvantaged households, on their well-being. Exploiting the targeted introduction of the policy and using large nationally representative data in a difference-in-difference framework, we confirm the findings of the existing literature on PMUY that while the policy succeeded in substantiall