Hundreds of migrant labourers and scores of outstation students are leaving the National Capital Region every day for their homes in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar because of the LPG crisis.
Labour Chowk in Sector 49, Noida, on Thursday witnessed scenes reminiscent of the Covid lockdown although the scale and the challenges of the exodus were far smaller.
Several hundred daily wage earners from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar gathered at the spot before fanning out in large groups towards the nearest railway stations.
“More than 200 migrant labourers from Ballia, Sonbhadra, Mirzapur and Varanasi alone work here,” Ram Awadh Maurya, a Mirzapur native hired as a labourer by a real estate company in Noida, told reporters.
“Today, we together decided to return home because we can’t afford LPG, which is the only cooking fuel here. Some vendors are selling at ₹300 a kilogram, and it gets exhausted in two days.”
He asked: “Tell me, how can someone who earns ₹600 a day survive here? So we decided to stay away as long as the crisis persists.”
As Amar Kumar Yadav, a native of Gaya in Bihar who works for an electrical goods manufacturer in Noida, said: “In our village, we can use firewood and cow-dung cakes.”
Many of the migrants, particularly the day labourers, have to keep changing their address and do not therefore have official LPG connections.
A 14.2kg domestic LPG cylinder costs a little over ₹900 in the capital, which is far below the black market prices these workers are being forced to shell out.
“We use small LPG cylinders. The local vendors are refilling them for anything between ₹250 and ₹700 per kilogram. Their prices change hourly, according to the escalation of the (West Asia) war,” Yadav told reporters.
“Our landlord doesn’t allow us to use firewood inside the rooms.”
An undergraduate Delhi University student who returned home to Gonda in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday told reporters that many other students too had left because they could no longer afford to cook their food at their rented lodgings.
“It was very difficult to attend classes as we were forced to spend entire days searching for LPG. Some students are buying cylinders at ₹500 a kilogram,” the student, who didn’t want to be named, said.
“Once, we bought 2kg of LPG for ₹1,000 and found out after a day that the vendor had cheated us. There was hardly any gas in the cylinder.”
He said multiple students share rooms, unsure how long the landlord would let them stay, so they don’t apply for a connection.
Rupesh Kumar, a labourer from Rohtas in Bihar, said there are problems with securing connections.
“The agencies force you to buy a stove from them if you take a connection. Besides, our job is unstable and we don’t know when we would have to shift from Noida to Gurgaon or Rohtak in search of a job,” he said.
“So, we don’t want a permanent connection. A family from Bihar which lives near my place in Noida has an LPG connection but they couldn’t get it refilled even 15 days after booking.”
Officially, a cylinder is expected to be refilled about 10 days after the booking. Two consecutive bookings must be separated by at least 25 days in urban areas.
Awadhesh Prasad, Samajwadi Party MP from Ayodhya, said he was “meeting people, including students, (from the Awadh region) almost every day who found it difficult to stay on in the NCR (and returned home)”.
“The government is not ready to accept that there is an LPG crisis because of the war in West Asia, but we can see its direct impact on the people,” he said.
The central government claims there is no LPG scarcity and accuses the Opposition of spreading rumours to create panic.
Chief minister Yogi Adityanath has claimed the rest of the world is facing a cooking gas crisis because of the war while things are very much under control on the Narendra Modi government’s watch.
Samajwadi president Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday referred to the Covid lockdown when millions of migrant workers and their families from the NCR region had walked hundreds of miles to their homes in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal, many dying on the roads.
“Once again, we are learning to depend on traditional fuels like firewood because of an inefficient government,” he said.