Case 61 · Consumer harm

The cylinder. Subsidy withdrawn, refills never came

Price peak 01 Mar 2023

No answer for the empty cylinders

1,263 days since Recorded outcome: No answer for the empty cylinders.

Human cost

10.33 crore Ujjwala connections issued, but a CAG audit found average consumption of 3.21 refills a year, and 17.61% of beneficiaries — about 56 lakh households — never returned for a second refill at all

Financial cost

Domestic LPG subsidy fell from ₹46,458 cr in 2013-14 to ₹1,811 cr in 2021-22. The Delhi cylinder went from ₹414 subsidised in Jan 2014 to a ₹1,103 market peak in Mar 2023

What happened

A connection is not a kitchen. Ujjwala put a cylinder in more than ten crore homes, but the CAG's 2019 audit found beneficiaries were buying 3.21 refills a year against the three to four the scheme assumed, and that consumption was falling, not rising. Nearly 56 lakh households never bought a second cylinder. In Chhattisgarh the average was 1.61. Meanwhile the general subsidy was wound down until transfers effectively stopped in mid-2020, and the market price nearly tripled from the 2014 subsidised rate.

Claim against record

What the government said

The government's position is that India imports over 60% of its LPG so prices track international markets, that it shielded consumers by letting oil companies absorb losses and compensating them ₹22,000 crore, and that it passed on only an 89.7% price rise against a 235% rise in Saudi contract prices. It says Ujjwala took coverage from 62% to near-saturation, that a ₹300-a-cylinder targeted subsidy for up to nine refills holds the effective price near ₹35 a kg, and that per-capita refill consumption has since risen from 3.01 in 2019-20 to 4.34 annualised in 2024-25.

What the record shows

No answer for the empty cylinders

The audit also found that poor refill uptake among 92 lakh loanee consumers blocked recovery of ₹1,234.71 crore in outstanding loans, and recorded 3.44 lakh instances of oil companies issuing between 2 and 20 refills in a single day to households holding one cylinder. No official has answered for a scheme measured in connections issued rather than in cooking fuel actually burned, and the headline count kept being announced while the refill data went unmentioned.

Contested / alleged

The common comparison of ₹414 in 2014 against about ₹1,100 today is not like-for-like: the first is a subsidised quota price under a scheme that no longer exists, the second an unsubsidised market price.

What accountability should have looked like

A scheme audited on refills rather than connections, published per-household consumption data, and a subsidy that survives contact with the price it was meant to offset.

Ministers and office-holders responsible

Owns Ujjwala and LPG pricing; reports connections, not sustained useMinistry of Petroleum and Natural Gas

Naming who held the portfolio is a matter of public record. It is not by itself a finding of personal responsibility for any death or any rupee.

Sources

T1 primary record · T2 reporting · T3 partisan

Ask them officially. File an RTI Know a better source? Add one

Cite or export this case

Citizens' Accountability Ledger, "The cylinder. Subsidy withdrawn, refills never came" (Price peak 01 Mar 2023), case-57. https://whoisresponsible.xyz/case/case-57/

JSON for this case The whole ledger as CSV

Quote the case id rather than the number on the card. The id never changes; the number shifts whenever an older case is added ahead of this one.