Induction cooktops are flying off shelves faster than platforms can restock them. Blinkit, Zepto, Amazon and Flipkart are showing out-of-stock across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai. LPG cylinders in Delhi have crossed ₹913 and availability in many areas is patchy at best. If you have been refreshing your phone trying to order an induction cooktop and failing, you are not alone — and you are not out of options.
Here are five real, practical alternatives that work right now.
Turn Your Kitchen Waste Into Free Cooking Gas With a DIY Biogas Setup
This is the most talked-about hack circulating on Indian social media and YouTube right now, and it actually works. The concept is simple: vegetable peels, leftover food scraps, and kitchen waste ferment in a sealed container to produce methane — the same gas you cook with from an LPG cylinder — completely free.
A basic home setup using two 200-litre plastic drums costs between ₹2,000 and ₹10,000 depending on what you already have at home. You feed kitchen waste and water into the digester daily, bacteria break it down over 12–48 hours, and the methane produced gets piped directly to your existing gas stove. A well-maintained family-sized setup produces one to two hours of cooking gas daily from normal household waste. People who have built these claim 60% or more savings on LPG over time.
The catch: you need outdoor space — a balcony, terrace or garden — and it takes one to two weeks to build up sufficient gas from a cold start. It is not a solution for tonight’s dinner but it is genuinely practical for anyone with some space and a weekend to set it up. Search “DIY biogas plant from drum India” on YouTube for step-by-step tutorials that have been viewed millions of times. This is trending for a reason.
Use a Solar Cooker for Zero-Cost Daytime Cooking
India receives more sunlight than almost any country on Earth, and a solar cooker is the one cooking solution that requires absolutely no fuel, no electricity, and no supply chain. Box-type solar cookers are available on Amazon and Flipkart for ₹1,000 to ₹5,000 and cook rice, dal, vegetables, eggs and even slow-roasted dishes using nothing but reflected sunlight.
The method is simple: place your vessel inside the insulated reflective box, angle it toward the sun, and let it cook. Most dishes take two to four hours, which sounds slow until you realise you set it and forget it while going about your morning. A useful hack that experienced solar cooker users swear by is the haybox method — once your food has been heated by the sun, transfer the vessel into a tightly insulated box (an old cooler, a blanket-lined container, anything that traps heat) and it continues cooking for hours from residual heat alone.
The limitations are real: it does not work at night or on heavily overcast days, and it cannot handle high-heat cooking like deep frying or quick stir-frying. But for boiling, steaming and slow cooking — which covers rice, dal, khichdi, vegetables and most staple Indian meals — it is entirely capable. For households that can shift their main cooking to daytime, a solar cooker eliminates LPG dependence for the majority of meals.
A Kerosene Stove Gives You an Instant Flame Without Any Electricity
Restaurants and hotels in cities including Bengaluru have already switched to kerosene stoves as an emergency backup during the current shortage. The same logic applies at home. Portable single and double-burner kerosene stoves cost between ₹500 and ₹2,000, are widely available at hardware stores and general merchants, and work exactly like a gas stove — you get an instant adjustable flame that handles everything from boiling water to making rotis.
Kerosene burns cleaner than wood or charcoal and works with every utensil you already own. The two real downsides are smell and ventilation — kerosene stoves produce fumes that require a well-ventilated kitchen or outdoor use, and the fuel has its own mild odour that some people find unpleasant. Availability and price of kerosene can also vary by area. But as a genuine like-for-like replacement for a gas burner that requires zero electricity and works in any flat or home, the kerosene stove is the most underrated backup option available right now.
Electric Alternatives That Work With Every Utensil You Already Own
If you have reliable power supply but could not get an induction cooktop, standard resistive electric hot plates and coil stoves are a different product entirely — and critically, they work with every utensil you already own. Unlike induction cooktops which require magnetic-base cookware, resistive electric stoves heat through a coil or plate and work with aluminium, regular non-stick, clay pots — everything. They cost ₹500 to ₹1,500 and are more widely available than induction cooktops right now precisely because they have not been swept up in the current buying surge.
Beyond hot plates, an electric pressure cooker or multi-cooker handles one-pot meals — dal, rice, khichdi, curries, stews — with minimal power draw and no open flame. A microwave or air fryer covers reheating, baking and quick snacks. Combining a resistive hot plate for main cooking with a microwave for reheating and an electric kettle for boiling water covers most of what a normal household kitchen actually needs day to day.
Shift to No-Cook and Minimal-Cook Meals for a Few Days
This is the simplest option and the one most people overlook because it feels like a compromise. It does not have to be. Indian cuisine has an enormous repertoire of no-cook and minimal-cook meals that are nutritious, filling and require nothing more than assembly.
Curd rice with pickle requires no cooking if the rice is left over from a previous meal. Sprouts — moong, chana, matki — take 10 minutes to prepare and need at most a brief microwave heating or no heat at all. Fruit, yogurt, nuts, roasted chana, murmura chivda, sattu mixed in water — these are not hardship foods. They are foods that people eat by choice. Overnight oats prepared the night before require no cooking in the morning. Sandwiches and wraps made from bread, vegetables and curd-based spreads are complete meals.
The strategy of batching — cooking large quantities of rice, dal and sabzi when gas is available and stretching them across multiple meals — reduces your daily cooking time and fuel consumption by 60–70% without any change in what you eat. If your LPG supply is uncertain rather than completely cut off, batching alone may be enough to bridge the shortage until supply normalises.
A practical note before trying anything: avoid the viral “water-powered stove” hacks and unverified chemical reaction methods circulating on social media. They range from ineffective to actively dangerous. The five methods above are established, tested and genuinely safe.
The LPG crisis may ease by late April when alternate supplies are expected to arrive. Until then, the combination of at least two of these methods covers most households entirely — and for anyone with outdoor space and a weekend to spare, the biogas setup turns a crisis into a permanent reduction in gas bills long after the cylinders start flowing again.