BENEFITS OF PM UJJWALA YOJANA AS PERCEIVED BY BENEFICIARIES OF JHALAWAR DISTRICT IN RAJASTHAN
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Date
2022
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DRPCAU, PUSA
Abstract
Energy is a fundamental component of practically all economic activity and has become crucial for raising living standards. Energy is, in fact, essential to both the infrastructure and the means of subsistence. Today, a country's energy consumption is frequently used as a measure of its level of development. A sizable section of the world's population, mostly those residing in developing countries, lack access to modern energy sources. In India, 49% of the population has access to CCF, compared to 688 million who do not, and 681 million who continue to utilise biomass in the old manner (International Energy Agency, 2019). The availability of clean cooking fuel is a major challenge for rural households in India. Additionally, using traditional solid cooking fuels poses a risk to the environment and human health due to the amount of smoke they produce when burned. This deprivation is predominantly suffered by rural women and children as they are the most exposed to harmful effects of this smoke from burning unclean fuels in cooking. Keeping this fact in view of preventing the health hazards of nearly half of the population in the country from traditional cooking method by providing them with a clean cooking fuel – LPG, on May 1, 2016, the nation's honourable prime minister, Shri Narendra Modi ji, with assistance from the ministry of
petroleum and natural gas, launched the very ambitious flagship programme "Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana" (PMUY), with the goal of making clean cooking fuel, such as LPG, available to rural and underprivileged households who were formerly using traditional cooking fuels like firewood, coal, cow-dung cakes, etc.
Upto now Ujjwala Yojana had completed 5 years therefore need was felt to explore the impact of Ujjwala yojana in some of the rural areas with the sole objective to have direct feedback from clientele group. So, present study entitled “Benefits of PM Ujjwala Yojana as Perceived by Beneficiaries of Jhalawar District in Rajasthan” was conducted in Jhalawar district of Rajasthan. Out of the 22 gas agencies in Jhalawar district Durga Devi Gas Agency of Jhalrapatan tehsil will be purposely selected. Four villages from Jhalrapatan block and a total of 120 participants, 30 from each village, were chosen by using random sampling procedure for the present investigation. With the help of structured interview schedule data was collected from the respondents.
For the present study two sets of variables namely, independent and dependent variables were selected. Social, personal, communicational, Type of fuel uses before and after Ujjwala benefits, Possession of LPG unit, Process of use and refilling of gas cylinders, Awareness were taken as independent variable and Perceived benefits and Willingness to pay for LPG gas cylinder were selected as dependent variables. The important statistical measures used to analyse the research data were, frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, Pearson’s correlation, regression, binomial logit and probit regression.
The study revealed that, in case of social participation, extension contact, extent of use of LPG, awareness majority of the respondents belonged to the medium level category. For other variables such as age (middle age group), family size (4or less people), caste(mostly belong to SC), education(mostly illiterate), land holding (majority marginal size), occupation (mostly homemakers), annual income(mostly medium level of income), mass-media exposure(majority belong to low-medium category), in routine household activities child care and cooking of food is the highest time consuming activities ,after Ujjwala 93.33% beneficiaries still used firewood and dungcake, majority of the beneficiary’s gas cylinder lasts to 41-65 days, beneficiaries use LPG mostly in milk boiling, tea making and partial cooking. In case of Perceived benefits, majority of the Ujjwala beneficiaries were perceived medium level of benefits from the scheme and Health & environmental benefits contributes the most with an
index value of 0.65 among five sub-benefits such Economic benefits, Health & environmental benefits, Technical benefits, Social benefits and Psychological benefits. The correlation analysis of perceived benefits with 20 variables concludes that only 5 factors were found significant in which the variable mass media exposure and mode of delivery of refilled gas cylinder were found to be significant at 1% level of probability. The regression analysis of perceived benefits with 12 independent variables concludes that only 6 factors were found significant in which mass media exposure was positively significant with the highest ‘t’ value(3.416) and R2-value was 0.315. On an average 4.75kg of solid fuels still used by beneficiaries on a daily basis apart from LPG gas cylinder because of the easy accessibility & affordability of the solid fuels compared to LPG gas cylinder in the study area. The pattern of willingness to pay for LPG refill by the beneficiaries was found distributed from less than Rs.350 to more than Rs.650 using double-bounded dichotomous contingent valuation method. The large portion (37.50%) of the beneficiaries were willing to pay Rs. 500-550 for per LPG refill while the average WTP on the basis of pattern of WTP by the beneficiaries were calculated and it was found Rs. 503/-. While analysing the factors or respondents’ attributes which affected the WTP for the LPG gas cylinder 4 factors were found to be significant using probit and logit model in which income variable was highly significant at 1% level of probability.