Council on Energy, Environment and Water Integrated | International | Independent
Suggested Citation: Auddy, Surya Shekhar, Varian Crasto, and Abhishek Kar. 2026.Understanding Clean Cooking Fuel Usage Among Migrants Evidence from Willingness to Pay Surveys in 10 Indian Cities. New Delhi: Council on Energy, Environment and Water.
India's migrant workers make up nearly a third of the country's population, yet they remain largely invisible to the clean cooking energy ecosystem. Since 2016, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) has extended LPG connections to 10.5 crore beneficiaries, and PMUY 2.0 opened the scheme to migrant families in 2021 through a simplified self-declaration process. However, no disaggregated data exist on how many migrant households have actually benefited, leaving a critical policy blind spot.
This issue brief presents new primary evidence from a survey of 1,061 migrant worker respondents across 10 Indian cities, examining what cooking fuels they use, how much they currently spend, and what they are willing to pay for cleaner alternatives. The findings are part of a larger survey of over 4,000 respondents spanning rural, urban slum, and migrant households.
By quantifying migrant workers' willingness to pay (WTP) alongside their current access and affordability constraints, this study identifies the precise price points and structural barriers, documentation gaps, informal pricing, and housing instability that keep migrants locked out of formal clean cooking access, and offers targeted recommendations to close this gap.
The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) scheme was launched to provide access to Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) for women from low-income households. Since 2016, the PMUY has provided LPG connections to 10.5 crore beneficiaries (PPAC 2026). In 2021, the benefits were extended to migrant worker families under PMUY 2.0 through a simplified self-declaration process (PIB 2021). No disaggregated data are available on the number of migrant households that have availed of this benefit, making it difficult to assess its reach and effectiveness. Migrants comprise 29 per cent of India’s total population (GoI MoSPI et al. 2020), a majority of whom are contractual and daily wage earners in brick kilns, quarries, mines, and the informal construction, manufacturing, and services sectors (Saldanha, D’Cunha, and Kovick 2023). They form the backbone of India’s informal economy. These migrants face a ‘triple exclusion’ from welfare, market, and social systems (Rajan and Nizam 2025). While they typically hold formal documents such as Aadhaar cards, ration cards, and bank passbooks, these are tied to their permanent home addresses; without updated address proof for their temporary work locations, they are unable to access benefits at their workplace.
They face a ‘domicile trap’, where benefits are tied to their state of origin rather than their current place of residence. Consequently, these migrants remained largely outside the formal clean cooking ecosystem. This study therefore presents primary evidence on migrant workers’ access to and affordability of cooking fuels, as well as their expectations regarding the transition to LPG for cooking, to inform the policy discourse on LPG subsidies and access.
Assessing usage and willingness to pay (WTP) is crucial to understanding the price point at which refill behaviour changes, and so bridges physical access and functional adoption. The COVID-19 pandemic reversed gains in clean cooking access and usage across several developing countries (International Energy Agency et al. 2026; Pachauri et al. 2021). This has also impacted the WTP for cleaner fuels. Accordingly, this issue brief examines cooking fuel choices and WTP for cleaner fuels among economically vulnerable groups most likely to rebound to solid fuels post-pandemic. The findings form part of a larger survey of more than 4,000 respondents across urban informal settlements, migrant, and rural households. For the survey findings, slum households are defined spatially by residence in a slum settlement, whereas migrant workers are defined by recent, workdriven migration (arrived ≤6 months prior, intending to stay ≤12 months) in occupations such as construction, waste, transport, and kiln work.
Migrants remain locked out of formal LPG, and PMUY barely reaches them. 74 per cent use LPG; meanwhile, 26 per cent of migrants continue to depend on firewood. 79 per cent of LPG users depend on informal, unregulated connections. Though opened for migrants in PMUY 2.0 in 2021, only around 4 per cent of LPG using migrant respondents are PMUY beneficiaries. Access is lowest among the most vulnerable groups: sanitation workers (44 per cent) and construction workers (30 per cent) lack LPG access.
Figure ES1. Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is the dominant fuel for cooking among migrants
Figure ES2. LPG connections dominate across all occupational types, with low formal PMUY coverage
Subsidised LPG remains unaffordable for most migrants. The median willingness to pay (WTP) for exclusive usage of LPG is INR 500 for a 14.2kg cylinder, but the 80th-percentile affordability limit is only INR 400, which is well below the effective subsidised PMUY price of INR 642 (July 2026). Among exclusive solid-fuel users, the bottom 50 per cent median WTP falls to INR 300.
Figure ES3. The overall affordability limit for 80% of migrants is INR 400/b>
The study focuses on work-driven migrants, defined as those who had moved to their current city within the past six months and did not intend to stay longer than 12 months, having migrated from their native place to another city, another district within the same state, or another state in search of work or livelihood. This distinguishes them from urban slum households, who are defined by residence in a slum settlement rather than by recent migration. The 1,061 respondents surveyed were predominantly engaged in occupations involving physically demanding work: 41 per cent were construction workers, and 31 per cent were labourers, with the remainder including masons, cab drivers, sanitation workers, restaurant staff, domestic help, and others such as electricians, food vendors, painters, and brick kiln workers.
India's migrant workers remain largely excluded from clean cooking policy, trapped by a "domicile trap" tying welfare benefits to their home address rather than workplace. With limited prior evidence on their fuel access or affordability, this CEEW study surveys 1,061 migrants across 10 cities, quantifying LPG usage, informal connection reliance, and willingness to pay, filling a critical data gap to inform PMUY reforms and subsidy design for this vulnerable population segment.
PMUY is a Government of India scheme launched in 2016 to provide free LPG connections to women from low-income households, and it has since provided deposit-free LPG connections to over 105 million women. In 2021, PMUY 2.0 extended eligibility to migrant worker families through a simplified self-declaration process. However, in practice, applicants still need to declare family composition linked to their ration cards for verification, a major barrier for migrants, since their family ration card is typically registered at their place of origin, not their place of work.
Among the 1,061 migrant workers surveyed across 10 cities, 74 per cent use LPG in some form (66 per cent exclusively), while 26 per cent still depend on firewood, including 18 per cent who rely on it exclusively. The remaining respondents use other fuels such as cow dung cakes, agricultural residue, coal or charcoal, piped natural gas, or electricity.
Nearly 79 per cent of migrant LPG users lack a formal, registered connection not because they lack documents altogether, but because the documents they hold (Aadhaar, ration cards, bank passbooks) are tied to their permanent home address, not their current place of work. Caught in this domicile trap, they end up buying partial refills through unauthorised kirana or hardware stores instead, despite paying significantly higher prices.
Informal LPG users pay a median of INR 71 per kg for a 14.2 kg cylinder, compared with INR 59 per kg for formal connection holders, a premium of more than 20 per cent. Around 52 per cent of informal users rely on smaller 5 kg cylinders, where the per-kg cost is 41 per cent higher, meaning already constrained for cash liquidity these migrants effectively pay the most for their cooking fuel.
Willingness to pay refers to the maximum price respondents said they would pay for a full 14.2 kg LPG cylinder, without being given a reference price. The overall stated median WTP was INR 500, but the 80th-percentile affordability threshold, the price at which 80 per cent of respondents remain willing to pay, was only INR 400. This is well below the effective subsidised PMUY price of INR 642 (as of July 2026), indicating that even subsidised LPG remains unaffordable for a majority of migrant workers.
Yes. The survey found a strong link between housing stability and fuel choice: only 11 per cent of migrants in rented accommodation rely exclusively on solid fuels, compared with 70 per cent of those living on footpaths or in open spaces. Migrants without a fixed address struggle to meet the documentation requirements for a formal LPG connection, reinforcing their reliance on costlier informal fuel sources.
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