Dodging tigers and the law: In rural Madhya Pradesh, LPG shortage drives many into forests

Across Madhya Pradesh, an LPG supply crunch has pushed households and businesses into a quiet, grinding crisis. The conflict in West Asia following the US and Israel’s strikes on Iran has led to a shortage of LPG, and panic about the supply of cooking gas has added to the disruption.

In Bhopal, Indore, and Ujjain, residents — many of them elderly or children sent by their families — have been standing in lines for six to eight hours outside gas agencies. In some areas, people have dragged empty cylinders onto roads in protest. The state government has instructed District Collectors to monitor stocks and prevent black marketing. Chief Minister Mohan Yadav has constituted a cabinet committee to oversee the situation, while simultaneously appealing for calm, saying there are “no difficulties in the supply system and that no one needs to worry”.

On the ground in Barkheda, a village of 3,500 people roughly 10 kilometres from the nearest LPG agency, no one has received that reassurance.

The delivery agents who used to come like clockwork, hauling the blue-and-red cylinders off their trucks and into people’s homes, have stopped answering their phones. The market price for a cylinder, when one can be found, has jumped to Rs 1,200 or Rs 1,400. And the forest is once again vulnerable to illegal firewood collection.

Food being cooked on firewood at a dhaba in Barkheda. (Express Photo)

Bakheda village

Barkheda is like many villages in this part of Madhya Pradesh — close enough to the idea of modernity to have tasted it, far enough from its infrastructure to lose it quickly. The homes are mostly mud-brick with tin roofing, while a steady stream of concrete homes has slowly transformed the landscape. It was five years ago that residents of this village came under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), aimed at bringing LPG connections to rural households. This led to a major shift from the use of firewood to the use of gas cylinders for cooking.

Most of the men here drive trucks. They are away for weeks at a stretch, hauling goods across the national highway networks, sleeping in their cabs at dhabas, sending money home. The women run the households, which means that when the gas cylinders stopped coming, it was the women who had to figure out what to do.

Mathra Bai leaves at eight in the morning. She walks to the nearby woods — not the deep forest where tigers move, but the edges, where the risk is lower. She spends the whole day there, finding the right wood. She cuts about 5 kg of it and carries it back herself.

“Five kilograms will last us a week. Maybe two days if I cook for all six members of the family,” Mathra Bai said.

In the 45 or so tribal households clustered at the edge of the village, the scramble for LPG has become a crisis. Meena Uikey booked a cylinder nine days ago, when she was given a token and told to wait 15 days. She has now been without gas for over a week and has been eating just once a day. The men in her household are away, and she cannot go into the forest herself — not because of the physical labour, though that is real, but because of the tigers. There have been sightings in the area. The forest department has issued informal warnings.

“If I go there for food,” she says, “I will become food for tigers.”

After a pause, she adds, “We are old women with no men around the house. We can’t even get anyone to lift our bodies if we die.”

DFO (Raisen) Pratibha Shukla, who also oversees the Obaidullahganj range, said the Forest Department has purchased adequate stock to address the issue. “In my jurisdiction, I conducted a three-year study on why the villagers resorted to illegal firewood and bought over 10% surplus stock to address the crunch. Currently, there is no shortage of cylinders in the area,” Shukla said.

A senior official from the Forest Department, who oversees the Barkheda region, said, “This region historically has a culture of firewood collection. It slowed down after the Ujjwala scheme came. Now, there is a fear that people will be relying on firewood again. We want to assure the locals that there is adequate LPG cylinder supply and that the crunch is temporary. We are advising people not to go near forest areas.”

Small businesses hit

In rural Madhya Pradesh, the wedding season begins in the spring, after the harvest is reaped and families have money in their hands and reasons to celebrate. The marigolds come out, the dhols start up, and for a few weeks, the villages fill with the controlled chaos of weddings — the feeding of hundreds of guests, the all-night cooking, the enormous quantities of rice, dal and halwa that emerge from makeshift kitchens.

This year, caterers like Amjad Ali are sitting idle. He has not received a single order this season. The guest lists have been quietly trimmed from 150 to 50, and the festive atmosphere that usually electrifies these weeks has been replaced by a flat, anxious calculation. “Weddings will take a real hit if this crisis continues for weeks,” he says. His own family has no gas cylinder at home.

The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, launched in 2016, was designed precisely for places like Barkheda. Subsidised cylinders, delivery to the doorstep, the government’s deliberate effort to pull rural women away from the open-fire cooking that damaged their lungs and took hours.

Bhagwan Singh Chauhan, the deputy sarpanch of Barkheda, remembers the shift. “In the last five years, this village had slowly begun moving towards the gas cylinders,” he says. Out of roughly 3,500 residents, almost every home had made the switch. Only around 20 households have induction cooktops, with people here were wary of the technology, he says. But they had trusted the cylinder.

Now, Chauhan spends his days trying to track down the two delivery agents who served the village. There is no LPG agency nearby; the nearest is in Mandideep, 47 kilometres away. The agents simply stopped coming. “We have been calling them every day,” he says. “There is no answer. We have to go find them.”

When families managed to locate cylinders through these agents, they’re being sold at Rs 1,200 to 1,400 — nearly double the subsidised rate. Many people, especially the older and more isolated residents, don’t even know where to begin. “It had become so easy when the delivery people used to turn up like clockwork,” Chauhan says. “Now we are scrambling.”

Rajesh Sirothia, who runs a small samosa shop, last cooked over firewood five years ago. He was good at it — “You just arrange some bricks, stack the wood, and you’re set,” he says. It’s almost muscle memory for men of his generation. His cylinder was bought at the start of March and will run out in three weeks. He is already making plans, thinking about where to get his firewood stock from. As he rolls the dough for the afternoon batch, he explains the problem with going back, which is not the cooking itself but the conditions it creates.

“I can cook samosas in the same time on cylinders and on firewood,” he says, “But with firewood, I can’t stop it. I need to keep it running. The whole shop fills with smoke. Customers can’t sit. The heat builds up inside in the summer.”

Down the road, Kailash Jat sells ice cream. He is from Rajasthan originally and has developed his own variation of badam ice cream — a recipe he arrived at through years of small adjustments. Making the raw mixture, heating the milk, reducing it, and coaxingn out the flavours requires sustained heat over several hours. On a gas cylinder, he can produce 40 litres in an hour. On firewood, the same batch takes three to four hours. The economics of a small ice cream cart don’t survive that math, not in a season when he needs to move product quickly before it melts.

“Even if I have to pay Rs 1,500, I will shell out that money,” he says, adding, “I have no hope of securing a gas cylinder in the future.”

Pointing out that she has enough firewood in her kitchen, local resident Uma Devi is not worried. “I can feed a family of 12 people easily,” she says, “and if needed, I can also feed others. There is no shortage in my mind. We are used to this life.”