With the Bharatiya Janata Party securing decisive victories in West Bengal and Assam, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged citizens to exercise restraint in fuel consumption and prepare for a difficult period ahead. Amidst the war in West Asia, his appeal evoked memories of wartime austerity campaigns and the Covid-19 crisis and came unsurprisingly after the assembly elections.
He was a tad late to the party. The war had entered the countryside before the elections. The austerity measures had already begun there as an inevitability, not as a symbol of nationalism. The countryside understands geopolitics materially. High fuel prices mean high production costs. Shipping disruptions mean expensive fertilisers. Freight hikes push up vegetable prices in mandis. Falling income means no new purchases of liquid assets like gold.
Marginalised households are falling back on firewood and old-fashioned chulhas to cook food, as LPG cylinders are hard to deliver to villages. In a village in Telangana’s Nalgonda district, a tea seller said that he and other vendors now switch off their stoves between orders to conserve gas. Women who had transitioned to LPG are, once again, using firewood. The cylinder is reserved only for essential use.
Across India, the rising prices of LPG and edible oil have hit small eateries, roadside vendors and migrant workers. Some vendors now cook meals only once a day because repeated stove use has become too expensive. In Hyderabad, groups of migrant labourers have begun pooling cooking resources to save fuel costs. Delhi is seeing migrants return to their native places.
In Kerala, people working in the Gulf haven’t yet returned, but remittances are affected. Across the countryside, the ongoing wedding season has been disrupted. At a recent wedding ceremony in western Vidarbha that this writer attended, the caterer had shifted to the good old bhatti (big chulha) to prepare the meals. Many families have postponed weddings to cut spending.
Reports of fertiliser shortage have already pushed prices up by 50%. Farmers are preparing to reduce fertiliser use this kharif season. Black marketing has increased, prompting frequent raids by the authorities. The price of every single input on the shelf has risen. In drought-prone North Karnataka, Marathwada and Bundelkhand, farmers report a sudden rise in the cost of plastic sheets used to line the floor of the farm ponds.
The cost of production will go up substantially this year, unlike during the pandemic, warn farmers’ leaders and agriculture experts. If the shortages hit the winter crop, the production of many commodities will record a drop.
India, in the meantime, lost three crucial months to electioneering instead of preparing for the crisis ahead. If the conflict deepens, the consequences are likely to spread across rural India: higher diesel prices, erratic fertiliser supplies, costlier transport, reduced acreage, shrinking purchasing power, and rising debts. Food inflation may return in the post-monsoon months. Informal workers will absorb the first shock, as they always do.
And, yet, scattered across India are villages quietly building another future — war or no war. In the Vidani village of Maharashtra’s Satara district, hundreds of households now use biogas generated from cattle dung. While LPG prices and shortages affect the surrounding areas, Vidani’s villagers with biogas plants remain relatively insulated. In nearby Manyachiwadi, Maharashtra’s first fully solar-powered village, rooftop solar systems now run homes, schools, street lights and water supply systems. Long before energy security became a national talking point, these villages had already begun solving it locally. A biogas plant in Satara will not stop missiles in West Asia. But it can prevent those missiles from extinguishing a stove in rural Maharashtra.
