Out of the average national coverage of 99.8% of domestic LPG connections, North Eastern states performed almost seven percent less than the national average and Eastern India states performed 13 % less than the national average, revealed the Data released by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
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Notwithstanding government’s commitment to lay stress in the North East Areas, the coverage of domestic LPG connections in East and North East India continues to perform poorly as against the Southern and Northern states.
Out of the average national coverage of 99.8% of domestic LPG connections, North Eastern states performed almost seven percent less than the national average and Eastern India states performed 13 % less than the national average, revealed the Data released by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
On the contrary, the performance of South Indian and North Indian states have performed more than the expected lines, with an average coverage of 107 % and 114%, the Ministry said. Top in the list of LPG coverage is Punjab which has 43 % more than the national average, followed by Jammu and Kashmir 33% and Haryana 27 %.
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Among poor performing states, Nagaland (70.6%), Tripura (78.4 %), Bihar (78.4%) and Jharkhand (76.1%) are the ones which are much below the national average, the Ministry said. “You do not go by the coverage of states, look at their growth
rate of coverage which is very encouraging. In 2015, India had 14.86 crore domestic LPG connections, which has increased to 30.53 crore in January this year—this has more than doubled in the past seven years,” said a senior officer of the Petroleum Ministry.
If we look at the growth of Commercial LPG Connections the growth is just half of what we witnessed in the domestic sector. “It has increased from 21.1 lakh connections in 2015 to 34.9 lakh connections this year, It suggests that the government has laid stress on domestic coverage of LPG fuel,” he said.
Furthermore the main coverage stress has been BPL families. In 2017 when PMUY (Prime Mantri Ujjwala Yojana) was introduced, 2 crore connections were added, in another five years the number increased to 8 crores, he said.
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