"We keep the stove near the balcony and make dinner on fuel that burns," Salma B says, staring into a smoky pot. Her eyes hint at what the numbers say: 5.56 crore households didn’t book a single LPG refill in 2025‑26, according to responses from the country’s three oil marketing giants.
The look‑through data came in a mail from an RTI request. Chandra Shekhar Gaur, a Neemuch activist, asked Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum for consumer records. A total of 3.30 crore consumers never booked a refill, and 2.26 crore made just one. The gap between supply and the inevitable “must‑eat” demand widens each week as the war in the Middle East throttles global gas shipments. The quietest streets are the ones where the government has a hard time reaching every stove.
The Gulf conflict hit India’s fuel pipeline first. Shipping lines filled with tanker trawling in the Aegean left a dearth of cargo containers. Meanwhile, the freight rate for oil‑based fuel spiked. Traders in Mumbai, Delhi and Pune began inflating prices. In Bhopal, the queue outside the booking centre stretched past the curb, a symbol that caught half the city’s commuters in a frenzy of panic buying. Nothing prevented the scramble of workers with pocket loans and a handful of women carrying a fragile 15 kg cylinder to the nearest vendor.
In Banganga, a family of seven drags a 15‑kg cylinder when nights grow cold. In the days that follow, they pool their energy. They switch back to an ancestral chulha out of pure frugality. Direct cost is down—there’s no monthly bill—but the smoke seeps into the thin walls. “We take a cylinder in between, but we try to keep using the chulha for cooking so that the expense comes down,” she notes. Another resident, Shehzadi B, avoids the domestic flame entirely; her family’s four members have passed three months without a refill. “Earlier, we used to get a cylinder every month,” she said before the line cut off. The stories mirror the data: even when supply exists, affordability forces rationing.
When a consumer doesn’t book a cylinder, the company’s server flags a “no‑refill” pantry, but the marketing cluster runs a different script. In some states, the National Emergency Response Committee drafted fuel‑distribution plans that prioritize frontline workers and essential industries. Yet provinces with high GST receipts see their citizens leaning on black‑market vendors. Underground prices shoot past the official rates, offering bleeder waivers to desperate mothers and artisanal bakers. As more households turn to shortcut solutions, the vicious circle of scarcity tightens, reinforcing the war’s secondary blow to India’s domestic economy.
So, if a third of the country is biting the bullet
