LPG connections to reach five crore women through Ujjwala Yojana: Dharmendra Pradhan

Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan on Tuesday said new LPG connections would be reaching five crore women at the below poverty level (BPL) during the next three years through the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a scheme for providing free LPG connections to women of BPL households.

"We have set a target of giving a new LPG connection in next three years to five crore women at BPL with government assistance. For that eight thousand crore funds have been allocated. This financial year, the Finance Minister has budgeted two thousand crore rupees for this purpose and we have a target of giving 1.5 crore connections this year," Pradhan told ETV News head Jagdish Chandra in an exclusive interview here.

"Five lakh women in India, every year, lose their life due to domestic smoke. Crores of rupees are spent for treatment. Woman have to make lot of efforts to collect woods. So, after this LPG connection they will be relieved from all such effort and their health condition can be improved," he added.

On selecting woman consumers, Pradhan said a list has been prepared on Socio Economic Caste Census to segregate women population.

"Under instruction of Supreme Court, both Centre and State government have jointly prepared a list based on Socio Economic Caste Census. From this financial year, both Centre and State government have agreed to implement many schemes based on this. Our department has also accepted SECC as base for implementing the scheme. There are seven deprivation point for rural areas in this SECC. Anyone who fulfills even one of the seven point, then she will be eligible for beneficiary. There are different point for urban areas. We are going by that," he said.

Talking further on publicising the Ujjwala scheme he said: "We are improvising the scheme regularly. We are rectifying from whatever reviews we get from different sources including media. Social media plays an important role in this. They are able to directly come in our contact through social media and we are acting upon it. There are 18 thousand distributors. 16 crore 70 lakh consumers are there. In coming three years another seven-eight crore consumers will be added. So, there will be some issues, which we will be happy to resolve.