Cabinet approves Rs. 8,000 cr Ujwala Yojana to provide LPG connections to Rural India

The Cabinet has finally approved of a Rs. 8,000 crore Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana to provide free of cost cooking gas or LPG connections to women members of economically weaker households.

• The corpus budget would be utilized for three years with an aim to provide to thoroughly and speedily provide LPG connection free of cost to women members from BPL families since poor people have no access to cooking gas.
• Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has in his Budget speech in 2016 said that due to inaccessibility of cooking gas, women from BPL families are thereby forced to cook in open fire which severely damages their health because cooking in “chullah” is similar to smoking 400 cigarettes in an hour.
• So, the central government is working towards finding a remedy to this problem by providing LPG connections under names of women from poor families. This scheme aims at covering a total number of 5 crore BPL households to ensure of “universal coverage of cooking gas in the country”. He further said that this move has been brought in to empower women across the rural India and protect their health.

(Source: The Hindu)