If you have a piped natural gas connection at home but are holding on to your LPG cylinder as a backup for power cuts or cooking flexibility, the government has issued a directive with real consequences. Surrender the cylinder within 90 days or lose your cooking fuel supply entirely. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has invoked the Essential Commodities Act to enforce the transition, and oil marketing companies will digitally map addresses to automatically block LPG cylinder bookings for any household where piped natural gas is available.
This is not a suggestion. It is a legally backed mandate with a hard deadline.
Why the Government Is Doing This Now
The trigger is the Iran war. India imports approximately three-fifths of its LPG, and roughly 90 percent of those imports transit the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed for most of the past five weeks. The consequences have been immediate and severe. Cylinder shortages have emerged across multiple cities. Booking gaps of up to 45 days have been reported. Black market prices for LPG cylinders have reached Rs 4,000 per cylinder in some locations, compared to the government-subsidised price of Rs 913.
The government’s response is not to source more LPG. It is to reduce the number of people who depend on LPG by forcing households that have an alternative, the piped gas connection, off the cylinder network entirely. With 33 crore LPG connections in India and only 1.6 crore piped gas connections, the transition is enormous in scale. But in a supply emergency, even moving a fraction of dual-fuel households off cylinder dependency frees up meaningful supply for those with no alternative.
LPG vs PNG — Why They Are Not the Same Thing
To understand why households are reluctant to switch and why the government’s mandate is genuinely disruptive, you need to understand how different LPG and PNG actually are as cooking fuels.
LPG is primarily propane and butane, a byproduct of oil refining and natural gas processing. It is compressed into liquid form, packed into steel cylinders, and delivered to your doorstep. India produces only about 40 percent of the LPG it consumes. The rest is imported, mostly from the Persian Gulf, and the butane-heavy LPG blend that Indian households use is produced almost exclusively in the Gulf. Other suppliers, including the United States, produce propane-heavy gas that does not match India’s needs without blending infrastructure India does not currently have. Even if India managed to secure US cargoes, those shipments take 30 to 40 days to arrive versus 7 to 8 days from the Gulf, making emergency diversification practically impossible.
PNG is primarily methane, delivered continuously through underground pipelines at low pressure. Some comes from India’s own gas fields operated by ONGC, Oil India, and the Reliance-BP venture in the KG basin, allocated at a capped price under the Administered Price Mechanism. The remainder is imported as liquefied natural gas arriving at coastal terminals and regasified into the grid. Overall India produces roughly half the natural gas its PNG network consumes, marginally better than LPG’s 40 percent domestic sourcing, and critically, the import sources are more diversified across long-term LNG contracts with the US, Australia, and Qatar rather than concentrated at a single Hormuz chokepoint.
The Cooking Problem Nobody Talks About
In the kitchen, LPG and PNG behave very differently, and those differences matter enormously for Indian cooking.
LPG has roughly 2.5 times the energy density per cubic metre compared to natural gas. It produces a hot, intense flame that can be ramped up and dialled down quickly. Indian cooking is built around precisely this characteristic. The split-second blast of heat for a tadka of spices, the sustained high flame under a kadhai of deep-frying oil, the rapid toggle between high and low that a phulka demands. These are not minor cooking preferences. They are the fundamental mechanics of how most Indian food is prepared.
PNG’s flame is gentler and slower to respond. The difference is perceptible and meaningful to anyone who cooks seriously. Electric induction, often suggested as a third alternative, suits Indian kitchens even less. It is energy-efficient but does not match how most Indian cooking works, and most of India’s existing cookware including traditional karahi, tawa, and pressure cookers do not work on induction surfaces.
Households reluctant to switch are not being irrational. They are responding to a genuine functional difference. Most people who do switch simply retrofit their LPG stove for PNG by drilling out the gas jets. But this drops thermal efficiency, wastes gas, and can produce unsafe carbon monoxide levels. A proper stove conversion adds Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 to the already non-trivial switching costs.
The Strategic Rationale — and Its Limits
The government’s push for PNG over LPG has a clear strategic logic. LPG’s import dependency is concentrated at a single chokepoint: the Strait of Hormuz. There is almost no fallback. When the Strait closes, as it has now, India has essentially zero strategic LPG reserves to draw on. What exists is just-in-time delivery, gas flowing from import terminals to bottling plants to consumers with almost nothing stored in between. The current cylinder shortage is the direct result of that storage vacuum meeting a supply disruption.
PNG’s supply, while also partially imported, is diversified. No single chokepoint can kill the entire PNG supply chain simultaneously. This is the core argument for the transition and in the context of the current crisis it is a compelling one.
But Zerodha’s analysis identifies the limits of the strategic argument with precision. India is not eliminating a supply-chain vulnerability. It is diversifying from one dependency to another. As demand for natural gas grows and India’s domestic gas production declines, LNG’s share of total gas consumption is projected to rise from approximately 48 percent today to 75 percent by 2035. When LNG imports double as a share of supply, input costs roughly double as well, which feeds directly into higher PNG rates for households.
The government stress-tested this fragility in late 2024 when it slashed APM gas allocation to city gas companies by 35 to 40 percent, forcing companies to buy spot LNG at roughly double or triple the APM price. Margins collapsed. Shares of Indraprastha Gas and Mahanagar Gas crashed 18 to 20 percent in a single day. That was a government-induced stress test. The next one may not be under controlled conditions.
What You Need to Do If You Are Affected
If you have a piped natural gas connection at your address and currently hold an active LPG cylinder connection, you have 90 days from the policy’s implementation to surrender the cylinder. After 90 days, OMCs will use digital address mapping to automatically block your LPG booking access.
Check whether your address is already flagged as a PNG-available address in the OMC database. If you believe your PNG connection is inadequate for your household’s cooking needs and you require the LPG cylinder for genuine supply security reasons, the 90-day window is the period in which to raise that case with your local gas distributor.
If you need to retrofit your existing stove for PNG use, budget Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 for a proper conversion rather than the cheaper but unsafe jet-drilling method.
The Iran war’s supply emergency has given the government the push to complete an energy transition it has been trying to accelerate for years. The 90-day deadline is the most concrete evidence yet that the crisis is being used to drive structural change at speed. Whether the economics of the resulting PNG-dependent system work better for Indian households than the LPG system it is replacing is a question that will be answered over the next decade. For now, the deadline is 90 days.
If you have a piped gas connection at home but you're still holding on to an LPG cylinder as backup, the government has news: surrender it within 90 days, or lose your cooking fuel supply entirely.
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This article is based on analysis published by Zerodha Markets on April 1, 2026. Policy details are sourced from Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas communications. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.