Plea in HC challenges Rs 200 cashback per LPG cylinder exclusively for Ujjwala subscribers

NEW DELHI, (PTI): A petition was moved in the Delhi High Court on Wednesday challenging the constitutional validity of the scheme which provides for a Rs 200 cashback per LPG cylinder to the subscribers of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) and is not applicable to other below poverty line (BPL) families.

The petition came up for hearing before a bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad which listed it for further hearing on February 13 along with a similar plea.

The PMUY was launched on May 1, 2016 to provide access to cooking gas cylinders to BPL families without consumers having to pay a deposit to fuel retailers. Under the scheme subsidised LPG connections were to be provided to over 50 million BPL families over three years with government support of Rs 1,600 per connection.

The petition sought an identification exercise to be launched with regard to the BPL families not covered under the Ujjwala Yojana. The petitioner also sought the court’s intervention for the benefit of the cashback scheme to be extended to them. Petitioner Aakash Goel, a lawyer, has challenged the provision of the Ujjwala Yojana for transfer of Rs 200 per LPG cylinder up to 12 cylinders in a financial year into the bank accounts of the beneficiaries of the scheme alone and not all BPL families.

The government had in May 2022 announced a subsidy of Rs 200 per gas cylinder (up to 12 cylinders) a year for the subscribers of the Ujjwala Yojana that would have led to a reduction in its price for them.

“The said scheme is manifestly arbitrary, exclusionary and discriminatory as it excludes from its ambit the BPL families who are not subscribers of the Ujjwala scheme that was introduced in 2016 and thereby is violative of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution,” the plea said.

It challenged the constitutional validity of the cashback scheme, saying all poor people were facing financial hardships due to a surge in global crude prices due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

The plea said the Ujjwala scheme contemplated free LPG connections by Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) to families belonging to the BPL category.

It said as per the guidelines, any BPL household that did not have access to an LPG connection at the start of the Ujjwala scheme was eligible to apply.

“A bare perusal of the guideline clearly shows that the Ujjwala scheme excluded families of BPL households who already had LPG connection at the time when the Ujjwala scheme was to be brought into effect. This was correctly done by the respondent at the time of introducing the Ujjwala,” the petition said, adding the scheme was formulated in order to provide LPG connections to households where there were none.

However, this does not alter the fact that there existed a large number of BPL households that became ineligible for the Ujjwala scheme as they already had an LPG connection. The petition has sought the benefit of the Rs 200 cashback scheme to be extended to all BPL households irrespective of whether they were covered under the Ujjwala Yojana or not.

It contended denying those BPL families, which already had LPG connection before the Ujjwala Yojana was launched, the benefit of the cashback scheme is ”arbitrary, exclusionary, discriminatory and illegal”. (PTI)