Access to clean cooking fuel and women outcomes

This paper examines the impact of India's Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), a clean cooking policy that offered free Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) connections to women from economically and socially disadvantaged households, on their well-being. Exploiting the targeted introduction of the policy; and using a large nationally representative data in a difference-in-difference framework, we show that the policy has a positive impact on women's health, education and employment, although the effects on education and employment outcomes are relatively modest. Further, we show that the beneficiary women have higher autonomy post-policy. We also document that in districts with initially lower levels of clean energy access, improvements in employment, education, and health outcomes are lower, but improvements in women's agency measures are higher. Our findings suggest that while the effect on women's autonomy is primarily driven by registering connections in their name, improvements in health, education and employment are due to increased usage of LPG as the main cooking fuel. Overall, these findings provide evidence that a gender-responsive policy like PMUY can effectively enhance access to clean cooking fuel and subsequently improve women's socio-economic outcomes through both connections and consumption channels.