We will transform the quality of life of women in Rural India by providing electricity, tapped water, cleaner fuel and toilets in every home.

The 2014 manifesto does not name a cooking-gas scheme — Ujjwala did not exist yet. What it does say, in its section on rural women, is this: "We will transform the quality of life of women in Rural India by providing electricity, tapped water, cleaner fuel and toilets in every home." Ujjwala, launched in May 2016, is the "cleaner fuel" part of that sentence, and it is the right thing to measure the promise against.

On the count of connections, the delivery is real and large. The CAG's performance audit, tabled on 11 December 2019, records that "as on 31 March 2019, Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) had issued 7.19 crore LPG connections, which is approximately 90 per cent of the target of eight crore connections to be issued till March 2020". Over the same period "All India LPG coverage also increased from 61.90 per cent in May 2016 to 94.30 per cent in April 2019". That is a change in how a very large number of Indian kitchens are supplied, achieved in under three years.

The promise, though, was cleaner fuel — not a cylinder in the corner. This is where the audit does its most important work. "Encouraging the sustained usage of LPG remains a big challenge as the annual average refill consumption of 1.93 crore PMUY consumers (who have completed more than one year as on 31 March 2018) was only 3.66 refills." For the larger cohort measured nine months later, it was worse: "refill consumption declined to 3.21 refills per annum." A household cooking on gas needs something closer to a cylinder a month. At three a year, the firewood or dung stove is still doing most of the cooking.

The audit identifies why, and it is mostly price. The Expenditure Finance Committee and PPAC-CRISIL had both flagged "the importance of small 5 Kg cylinders to make PMUY successful considering high refill cost as a barrier to LPG usage" — and only 92,005 beneficiaries, "0.24 per cent of 3.78 crore connections", were given one. The optional loan for the stove and first refill compounded it: because repayment came out of the refill subsidy, households that did not refill did not repay, leaving "outstanding loan of ₹1234.71 crore" stuck against 0.92 crore consumers.

On whether the right households got the connections, the audit found the controls thin. De-duplication was supposed to run on the Aadhaar of every family member; instead "1.60 crore (42 per cent) connections were issued only on the basis of beneficiary Aadhaar", which the audit calls a deterrent to de-duplication. The scheme was for women, but "due to lack of input validation check in Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) software, 1.88 lakh connections were released against AHL TIN of males", and 8.59 lakh went to people recorded as minors. In the field, 784 of 4,348 records checked — 18 per cent — showed a listed beneficiary's identification number "used by LPG distributors to extend benefits to un-intended persons".

And some of the gas did not go where it was meant to at all. The audit found 1.98 lakh beneficiaries averaging more than twelve cylinders a year, 13.96 lakh taking three to 41 refills within a single month, and 3.44 lakh instances of two to twenty refills issued in one day against a single-cylinder connection — patterns it reads as diversion to commercial use.

Safety, the stated reason for the scheme — protecting the health of women and children — was checked too, and inspection was uneven: pre-installation inspection reports missing in 13.64 per cent of records test-checked, installation certificates in 12.75 per cent, and beneficiaries surveyed using non-standard hose pipes and standing stoves below the level of the cylinder.

Nine crore-scale connections in three years is a genuine achievement, and 94 per cent LPG coverage is not a rhetorical figure. But the manifesto promised cleaner fuel in the home, and on the audited record most Ujjwala homes were not yet cooking on it. Our verdict is lacks context.