13.87 lakh responsible Indians have given up LPG on subsidy. Have you?

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13.87 lakh responsible Indians have given up LPG on subsidy. Have you?
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Those huge hoardings with a #giveitup couldn’t be missed more conveniently if you are refilling your car at the gas station. PM Modi’s idea of encouraging well-to-do families to give up on their LPG subsidy has finally started to make a difference.

A news report from the Ministry of Oil reveals that 30,000 to 40,000 households are giving up their LPG subsidy everyday. These numbers come across as a surprise. In a country habituated to government freebies, what coerced a number of households to surrender subsidy?

Perhaps, it is the ‘Modi’ effect. Prime Minister had mentioned in his Independence Day speech that already 20 lakh people have given up subsidies. What is more striking is that within a day of the PM's speech, the number rose by more than a lakh to 21.26 lakh and has further gone up to 22.57 lakh, oil ministry data shows.


Last Saturday itself, about 29,000 households has surrendered subsidy. Add to that nearly 50,000 surrender requests that remain pending for verification at any given time, and it makes a compelling narrative of government success.

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On August 3, oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan told Parliament that nearly 13.87 lakh consumers had given up subsidy as of July 28. Godfrey Pimenta, convener of Mumbai-based NGO 'Watchdog Foundation', quoted a reply to an RTI query saying 7.77 lakh households had forgone subsidy as of July 1. In other words, the number of people surrendering LPG subsidy almost doubled in a span of 27 days.

"Our campaigners have found that the PM's appeal in the TV ad urging economically well off people to forgo subsidy in favour of the poor has found a resonance among consumers. Many are willing but somehow never got around to doing it for some reason or another. Once our boys approach them with papers, it takes little to make them sign on the dotted line," a senior executive of an oil company told TOI on condition of anonymity.

Modi first made the give it up call in April. The door-to-door campaign was launched in May-end but I t picked up momentum from June. The campaign is focused on affluent localities. "Someone living in Delhi's GK-I or Mumbai's Pali Hill doesn't need subsidy of about Rs 200 per cylinder at current rates. They understand this and are signing up willingly. The PM's appeal has made it easier for us to persuade people," the executive said.

All this is happening when international oil and gas prices are. The real test will be when prices rise and the subsidy gap widens to Rs 400-600 per cylinder. The subsidy had risen to Rs 800 during oil's peak run in the 2008-09 period.

There are 15.3 crore LPG-consuming households registered with the three oil marketing companies. Nearly 14 crore have joined Pahal, the programme for transferring cash subsidy directly into the bank account of consumers. So far, Rs 23,848.32 crore has been transferred by subsidy. The government has set a target of getting a crore households to give up subsidy.

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