When the cylinder at a roadside eatery in Patna didn’t arrive this month, the cook shrugged, lit a coal brazier and started ladling out dal and chawal the old way — a shift reported by The Times of India in March 2026. For millions of households and thousands of small restaurants across India, that shrug is a dangerous pivot: the sudden squeeze on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is not only disrupting meals and businesses, but also pushing people back onto solid fuels whose health and climate toll we thought we were slowly escaping.
India’s LPG system is built for convenience — and vulnerability. The country imports the bulk of its LPG, and recent disruptions to shipping through the Persian Gulf have choked deliveries. Vessel traffic jams and delays around the Strait of Hormuz have stalled LPG shipments to India. According to a Reuters report of March 2026, state retailers sold only about 1.15 million tonnes in the first half of March — a 17.3 per cent year-on-year and 26.3 per cent month-on-month decline — underscoring how global supply disruptions are denting India’s cooking-gas market.
The drop is not merely a logistics number — it has real, immediate consequences. The The Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has urged consumers to avoid “panic bookings” and asked households that can switch to piped natural gas (PNG) while refiners increase local output. Officials say local production has been raised to fill gaps, but supply remains tight for many urban and rural customers.
So what happens when LPG — a relatively clean cooking fuel — becomes scarce and expensive? The short answer: a lot of people revert to the cheapest fuels at hand. Reports from multiple cities show restaurants, caterers and even some midday-meal kitchens turning to firewood, coal or low-efficiency stoves while others rely on diesel-run burners or oxy-fuel setups to keep services running. In Patna and parts of Bihar, hotels and marriage-hall kitchens have shifted to coal, firewood and induction cooking as LPG supplies tightened during the March 2026 disruption. A March 2026 report by PatnaPress noted that the shortfall, linked to global tensions, has pushed many businesses toward traditional and electric alternatives to keep operations running.
Those costs are immediate and severe. Decades of public-health research link household use of solid fuels (wood, dung, crop waste, coal) to high concentrations of indoor particulate matter and toxic gases — drivers of pneumonia in children, chronic respiratory disease, heart disease and premature death. The World Health Organization’s Household Air Pollution and Related Health Impacts report (2025) estimates that exposure to smoke from solid-fuel cooking caused around 3.2 million premature deaths globally in 2019, and warns that reliance on wood, coal and similar fuels — disproportionately borne by women and children — also worsens local and urban air quality.
There’s an environmental angle beyond health. Increased demand for wood and charcoal can accelerate local deforestation and charcoal production — a slow, often invisible form of environmental debt. For cities, higher particulate emissions from mass fuel switching can derail seasonal air-quality gains made in recent years. For the climate, while LPG is a fossil fuel, solid-fuel combustion often releases more black carbon and particulate matter per meal — potent short-term climate forcers that accelerate warming and local heating, especially when used at scale.
Policy choices will determine whether this crisis is a temporary shock or a long-term setback. In the near term, transparent allocation of available LPG, anti-hoarding enforcement, and targeted support for commercial users (caterers, mid-day meal canteens) can limit harmful fuel switching. Medium term, the episode is a clear argument for accelerating transitions: expanding PNG where network economics make sense, subsidising induction conversion for commercial kitchens, scaling community biogas in semi-rural areas, and building strategic buffer stocks that reflect seasonal and geopolitical risk.
A final, uncomfortable point: energy transitions are not just about technology or subsidies — they are about reliability. Households adopt cleaner fuels when they can trust the supply will be continuous. A policy mix that combines resilient domestic production, diversified import routes, and rapid local alternatives will prevent the next crisis from becoming a public-health backslide.
For cooks like the one in Patna, the choice is immediate and pragmatic: feed customers today. For policymakers and environmentalists, the choice is slower but no less urgent: ensure that the next time a tanker is delayed, kitchens don’t have to choose between hunger and smoke.
Madan Meher teaches economics at Amity Business School, Amity University, Chhattisgarh
Sushanta Kumar Mahapatra teaches economics at ICFAI School of Social Sciences, ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education, Hyderabad
Muralidhar Majhi teaches economics at the School of Economics, Gangadhar Meher University, Sambalpur, Odisha
The views expressed in this article are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of the authors’ respective institutions.
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth