What does an Urdu story written in pre-independence India have in common with a National Geographic documentary about four women who cook with biomass fuel? You can say it’s a government scheme which provides clean cooking fuel to women from poor families.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said Munshi Premchand’s celebrated short story ‘Idgah’ inspired him to launch the Ujjwala scheme, under which over 4 crore families have got free LPG connections since its launch from Ballia in UP in 2016.
Munshi Premchand’s ‘Igdah’ inspired him to magnify the heart-warming act of empathy central to its plot, and apply it on a national scale.
“If Hamid can do it for his grandmother, why can’t a prime minister do it?” Modi said, narrating how the central character of the story, Hamid, buys a pair of tongs from an Idgah fair to save his grandmother from burns while cooking.
“I’m saddened by the fact that governments after India’s independence haven’t paid attention to such an age-old societal problem. [Providing] gas connections were not on the list of their priorities. And this is the reason that from independence to 2014, only 13 crores LPG [liquefied petroleum gas] connections were given,” he stated.
The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana launched a little over two years ago, is a part of a larger effort to add as many as ten crores new LPG connections by 2019.
In a video interaction with beneficiaries of the scheme through the Namo app, the PM referred to Premchand’s 1933 story to highlight the importance of easing the lives of homemakers.
Three Ujjwala beneficiaries were present at each of the over 600 centres across the country for the interaction. An estimated 10 lakh people viewed the interaction on various platforms, which included the Modi app, news channels and social media platforms.
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