The 'blue flame' revolution

Why the government can unambiguously take credit for the scheme to distribute cooking gas to poor rural households

“Due to bad figures in PMUY [Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana] during past week, kindly suspend all domestic LPG supply to this gas agency”.

This is an excerpt from a letter written by an LPG sales officer of an oil marketing company (OMC) about a gas agency in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur in October 2016. The letter, written just five months after the ambitious Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) scheme was launched at Balia in May 2016, reflected the “perform or perish” diktat that Narendra Modi attached to his “blue flame revolution,” to transform the lives of millions of housewives in rural