Sajad Hameed and Rehan Qayoom Mir report from Delhi’s Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, where trains are filling with daily-wage workers heading home to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Porters say the rush has been building for four or five days. The reason is not rent or wages — it is that they can no longer afford to cook.

The war’s cost reaches India through energy. Disruption around the Strait of Hormuz hits a country that depends heavily on imported LPG, so global price shocks pass straight through to households:

  • A 14.2 kg domestic cylinder cost roughly 400–500 rupees a decade ago, crossed 1,000 rupees in many cities in 2022, and now runs about 850–950.
  • For a worker earning 300–500 rupees a day, one refill is two to three days’ income.
  • The LPG subsidy exceeded 400 billion rupees annually in the mid-2010s; it fell sharply by 2020–21 and was only partially restored, narrowed to targeted programmes like Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana — about 120 billion rupees for 2025–26, as pricing shifted toward market-linked rates.
  • Parliamentary data shows Ujjwala beneficiaries use far fewer cylinders per year than other consumers: an affordability constraint, not a preference.

The coping strategies are visible in the reporting. Families go from agency to agency waiting for refills, stretch cylinders past their normal use, and cut the number of cooked meals. In Sangam Vihar, one of Delhi’s largest informal settlements, Parveena says her children have slept hungry for two days. Others fall back on firewood, kerosene, and the chulha — the traditional stove the clean-cooking transition was meant to retire.

That reversal has a body count attached. Wood and biomass smoke, concentrated on the women and children who spend the most time near cooking fires, is linked to respiratory illness. In one rural Odisha village, most homes switched to LPG, but 30 to 40 percent still burn firewood anyway, disproportionately the poorest. Electric cooking is offered as the next step, but it presumes appliance capital and reliable electricity — neither of which precarious households can count on.

What the piece makes clear is that a war fought thousands of miles away is settled in kitchens. Not by sanctions or strategic calculus, but by whether a migrant worker’s family eats that day — and, increasingly, by reverse migration: workers who came to the city to earn leaving it again because, as one street vendor put it, “if I cannot even eat, what is the point?”