New Delhi, May 16 (PTI) Expanding Piped Natural Gas (PNG) connections to 111 villages in Delhi’s periphery is a significant step towards addressing the needs of communities left behind in India’s clean cooking fuel transition, said Kalpana Balakrishnan, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health in India.

"These villages represent pockets that could not transition earlier despite economic opportunities nearby. If it were possible, they would have transitioned by now. These are households with the least socio-economic privileges, making this a crucial equity-favouring initiative,” Balakrishnan told PTI, referring to the Delhi government’s latest push to extend PNG supply to the rural areas.

The initiative by the Delhi government in partnership with Indraprastha Gas Limited (IGL) and other city gas distribution companies aims to replace traditional biomass and LPG use with cleaner, safer, and more affordable piped gas connections. It is part of a phased plan to connect all 357 villages in Delhi to the PNG network by the end of 2025.

The development comes just over a month after Dr Maria Neira, Director of the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health at the World Health Organisation (WHO), highlighted in an exclusive interview with PTI the urgent need to scale up LPG subsidy schemes in India.

Neira highlighted that India’s reliance on biomass fuels such as wood and dung for cooking contributes heavily to indoor air pollution and associated premature deaths, urging Indian authorities to maintain and expand existing clean cooking programmes to reduce health and environmental risks.

The Delhi PNG expansion targets over 1 lakh households across the 111 villages, mostly low-income communities that have faced unreliable or no access to clean cooking fuels for a long time. Experts pointed out that these clusters, often excluded from urban clean energy initiatives, lie within Delhi’s airshed and contribute significantly to the city’s pollution burden. Speaking to PTI, Executive Director at Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) Anumita Roy Chowdhury said that the effort is important to not only control rural emissions within Delhi’s airshed but also to ensure health security of rural households by reducing their exposure to solid fuel pollution.

The CSE’s 2024 report India’s Transition to E-Cooking revealed that 41 per cent of India’s population still relies on solid biomass fuels, which emit around 340 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually - about 13 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The report also noted that while the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) expanded access to Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) cylinders, it did not guarantee sustained clean cooking transitions for many beneficiaries. Many continue to use mixed fuels due to affordability and supply issues, limiting the scheme’s health and environmental impact.

"PNG connectivity, with its pipeline infrastructure, can overcome issues of fuel refilling and access, making a continuous supply of clean fuel possible," Roy Chowdhury told PTI.

"But affordability, safety awareness, and community support will be key to the sustained use of PNG in these villages.” Noting the gendered impact of clean fuel access, founder of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group Bharati Chaturvedi said that enabling poor women to access cleaner cooking fuels is vital for women’s health and that of their children.

“Indoor air pollution kills thousands monthly in India, and infants often bear the brunt because they stay close to their mothers during cooking,” she told PTI, adding that many women in these peri-urban villages work in informal sectors such as waste collection, domestic work, or vending, where taking time off to navigate subsidy paperwork or installation procedures is challenging.

Air pollution contributed to 8.1 million deaths worldwide in 2021, with India and China recording 2.1 million and 2.3 million fatalities, respectively, said a 2024 report by an independent US-based research organisation, in partnership with UNICEF.

The report stated that air pollution contributed to the deaths of 1,69,400 children in India under the age of five in 2021 and also said that air pollution was the leading risk factor for deaths in South Asia, followed by high blood pressure, diet, and tobacco. PTI ABU DR