40% of Indians do not have access to clean fuel, and nearly 20% still practice open defecation: NFHS

*Paromita Das
According to the National Family Health Survey, more than 40% of Indians do not have access to clean cooking fuel, and one in every five Indians still practice open defecation, contradicting the central government’s claims.

The figures rise in rural areas, where 57% of people cannot cook with LPG, natural gas, or electricity, and 26% practice open defecation. Furthermore, 56% of people in the countryside cook with coal, wood, charcoal, or dung cakes, and many of them cook in the same room where they live, exposing every member of the household to noxious smoke. More than 27% of rural Indian households lack a separate kitchen.

To prevent people from inhaling such household smoke, which has a negative impact on their health, the Narendra Modi government launched the Prime Minister Ujjwala Yojana in 2016 with the goal of providing free LPG connections and one cylinder to 8 crore families.
Six years later, the NFHS-5 survey shows that the country has 58 percent LPG penetration, whereas only 42 percent of households in villages use LPG or natural gas for cooking. Wood is the preferred fuel in rural India, with nearly 44% of households using it.

Even in better-off southern and western states, 15-30% of households use solid fuel for cooking, with the figure rising to more than 60% in eastern and central states.

According to the Union government, the target set for the PM Ujjwala scheme was met in August 2019, after which it was expanded to include an additional one crore families. There have been reports of families being unable to refill the cylinders after the first free one, or only doing so infrequently, because the cost of a cylinder is prohibitively expensive.

The story of open defecation is also somewhat similar. In 2019-21, the percentage of households using open defecation was 19%, down from 39% in 2015-16.

Despite progress, open defecation is still practiced in 26% of rural Indian households, according to NFHS-5, highlighting the challenges that the government faces in making India clean.

This comes eight years after the Modi government launched the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) mission with the goal of eliminating open defecation in October 2014. Five years after its inception, Prime Minister Modi stated at a public event that the number of people practicing open defecation had decreased from 60 crores to ‘negligible.’