Impact of cooking fuel connection subsidies on women outcomes: Evidence from India’s gender-responsive clean energy policy

This paper examines the impact of India’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a clean cooking policy that offered free Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) connections to women from economically and socially disadvantaged households, on their well-being. Exploiting the targeted introduction of the policy and using large nationally representative data in a difference-in-difference framework, we confirm that the scheme substantially increased LPG connections but had limited impact on consumption. We find that the limited increase in LPG consumption is translated into limited effects of the program on women’s education, employment and health outcomes. At the same time, the expansion of LPG connections, which were issued in the name of women, has led to improvements in women’s mobility, financial autonomy, and decision-making power. We exploit heterogeneity in initial district-level LPG access and show that consumption-related outcomes respond more strongly where access was already established, while connection-related outcomes respond more strongly where access was previously limited. This study also provides evidence that using primary cooking fuel as an indicator to measure the extent of clean energy transitions is inadequate because it masks the widespread practice of fuel stacking.