Every Indian Gets an Implicit Subsidy, Now You Have to Prove It With Biometric Authentication

Every country is proud of its inventions. The Americans gave the world the light bulb and the aeroplane. The British gave us the steam engine, the World Wide Web and, depending on who you ask, cricket. We Indians gave the world zero and chess. In 2026, India quietly added one more invention to that proud list. It is a subsidy you cannot see in your bank account, cannot check in your gas booking history, cannot refuse and now have to prove with your face, your fingerprint or your iris. It is called the implicit subsidy and it arrived on my phone as a polite message from HP Gas.

Most inventions solve a problem. The light bulb solved darkness. The aeroplane solved distance. The implicit subsidy solves a problem that ordinary citizens did not know they had: how do you give someone a subsidy without actually giving them any money and still ask them to prove they deserve it? The answer, it turns out, is to take a loss that oil companies have always called an under-recovery, give it a warmer name, send crores of SMS messages and then make biometric authentication the condition for buying cooking gas at the normal price. It is a remarkable piece of engineering and I want to understand how it works.

So this post is my attempt to reverse engineer the implicit subsidy. Who invented it? What does it actually mean? Why does a household that has not seen a rupee of LPG subsidy in its bank account for years now need biometric authentication to keep buying a cylinder? Why is Aadhaar voluntary in the Aadhaar Act but compulsory at my gas agency? And if every Indian gets an implicit subsidy of some kind, which they do, as you will see, then where exactly does this end? Every number here comes from the government or from a published report.

Note: I am not a lawyer. This is written from my common understanding as a citizen and an LPG consumer. Rules change and I may have missed a notification somewhere. If you have a different perspective or if something here is not correct, do discuss it in the comments and correct me.

The SMS that told me about my implicit subsidy

It started like most government stories in India start these days, with a message on my phone. “Dear HP Gas customer, you are advised to do eKYC for establishing your domestic LPG availability at the current selling price carrying implicit subsidy.” The message then told me this implicit subsidy was more than Rs 700 per 14.2 kg cylinder in June and more than Rs 500 in July 2026. It suggested I do eKYC at home using the HP Pay app, through my delivery person or at the distributorship. The last line was the real message: failure to do eKYC would make me ineligible for cylinders at domestic rates until eKYC is completed. Kindly complete it at the earliest.

Now, I am a curious customer. When someone tells me I am receiving more than Rs 700 on every cylinder, I like to see it. So I logged in to the HP Gas website and opened our cylinder booking history, which has a very promising title: “View Cylinder Booking History / Subsidy transferred”. It has columns for Subsidized Cylinder, Subsidy Amount, Transfer Status, Payment Type, Bank Name, Bank Account Number and Bank IFSC.

In other words, the page was built to show exactly the money I was being told about. Apart from the Subsidized Cylinder column, which simply repeats Delivered or Cancelled, every one of those columns was empty. Our delivered cylinder in July 2026 cost Rs 944.50 and the subsidy amount next to it was blank. To be fair, this is not a mistake. It is the whole point. The subsidy is no longer transferred to most households outside Ujjwala, which is exactly why it is now called implicit.

There were two more surprises. First, our older booking history was gone. Our connection, which is in my wife’s name, has been at the same address for more than ten years, yet the page now shows only a handful of recent bookings. Second, one of the entries is dated 01-01-0001 00:00:00. Apparently we booked a cylinder in the year 1 AD, which makes us very loyal customers indeed. For the record, ID proof and address proof were given when the connection was taken. Our household uses fewer than six cylinders a year. If anyone is diverting domestic cylinders to a hotel kitchen, it is clearly not our house. And yet, here we are, asked to prove ourselves with biometrics for an implicit subsidy, a word that exists only because no subsidy is transferred any more. We have not done it and I will explain why towards the end of this post.

Who invented the implicit subsidy?

Every invention has an inventor, so I went looking. The first place to look is the law. There is nothing called an implicit subsidy in the Constitution of India. I could not find the term in any Act of Parliament either. The Aadhaar Act, which is the law that allows the government to ask for authentication before giving a subsidy, does not use the word implicit anywhere. Section 7 of the Act talks about a subsidy, benefit or service for which the expenditure is incurred from the Consolidated Fund of India. Section 2 of the Act defines a subsidy as aid, support or a grant given to a person in cash or in kind. A price that a public sector oil company has not been allowed to raise is hard to fit into that description. So the implicit subsidy has no definition in any law that I could find. It lives in press releases and in written answers in Parliament, which brings us to how it was born.

For cooking gas, the government used a very different word for years. It called the gap an under-recovery. In August 2023, a Lok Sabha answer said the oil companies suffered under recoveries of approximately Rs 28,000 crore on domestic LPG. In August 2025, when the Cabinet approved Rs 30,000 crore of compensation for the oil companies, the word was again under-recoveries. As late as January 2026, a PIB release talked about the losses of oil companies. The government’s own economics glossary describes under-recovery as a notional loss that is different from the actual profit or loss of the oil companies. Notional is an interesting word. Hold on to it.

Then, in July 2026, something changed. A written reply in the Lok Sabha said domestic LPG cylinders carried an implicit subsidy (under-recovery) of more than Rs 700 per cylinder in June. Read that again. The government itself put the old word in brackets next to the new one. That is the earliest official use of implicit subsidy for domestic LPG that I could find. A month earlier, in June 2026, a ministry official at a press briefing had already called the gap a large indirect subsidy, so the subsidy framing was being tried out before the word implicit arrived. By 19 September 2026, the Petroleum Ministry’s release on biometric authentication said the implicit subsidy for September 2026 was around Rs 210 per 14.2 kg cylinder. Within a few weeks, the term had moved from Parliament to my phone. I cannot rule out an earlier use somewhere in a file, so treat this as the earliest I could find.

So who invented the implicit subsidy on my cooking gas? Not Parliament, which never passed a law defining it. The real innovation of 2026 is the renaming. An under-recovery is an accounting problem of an oil company. A subsidy sounds like something the government gives you. And as we will see later, a subsidy is exactly the kind of thing for which Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act allows the government to demand authentication. Words matter. When a notional loss of a public sector company becomes a subsidy to every household, it suddenly becomes something the household has to prove it deserves. That is a clever invention. I just wish it came with a patent filing so that we could read the specification.

Every Indian gets an implicit subsidy

Here is the funny part. By the government’s own logic, every Indian gets an implicit subsidy, every single day. Take the train. For years, Indian Railways printed a line on tickets saying it recovers only 57% of the cost of travel on an average. On suburban tickets the figure was only 36%. That is an implicit subsidy of 43% on an average ticket. Walk into a government school or a government hospital and the fees do not come anywhere close to the cost of running them. Apply the same logic the government now uses for LPG and every one of these unrecovered costs is an implicit subsidy. Drive on a road built with public money, drink water from a municipal pipe or switch on a fan powered by a state electricity board selling below cost. Congratulations, you are a subsidy beneficiary.

Now look at the fuel in your vehicle. Petrol and diesel prices at public sector pumps have been frozen for a long time. In March 2026, while cutting excise duty, the government said oil companies were facing under-recoveries of Rs 26 per litre on petrol and Rs 81.90 per litre on diesel. That is the same word that was used for LPG until July 2026. So if an LPG under-recovery is an implicit subsidy, then every litre of petrol and diesel sold in March 2026 also carried an implicit subsidy. On diesel, the gap was almost as large as the pump price itself. A truck filling 300 litres of diesel would have received an implicit subsidy of over Rs 24,000 in a single visit to the pump. Nobody asked the truck driver for his iris.

So the logic of the implicit subsidy has a small hole in it. If an implicit subsidy is reason enough to demand biometric authentication, then every Indian is on welfare and every counter in the country should have a fingerprint scanner. Nobody is proposing that at the petrol pump or the railway station. So why only the kitchen? Perhaps because the kitchen is the easiest place to start. The family in the kitchen votes too, but it has no union, no association and no lobby. A truck owner can call a strike. The person cooking dinner has a delivery person standing at the door with a phone and an app.

I am not saying cooking gas should not be priced fairly or that oil companies should lose money forever. That is a separate debate and a fair one. My point is narrower. The implicit subsidy is not something the government gives me. It is the difference between what I pay and what someone in an office has decided I should have paid. That someone can be wrong, can change the formula and can change the benchmark. Making biometric authentication depend on that number is like asking us to give our fingerprints every time the government decides not to raise a price. Which, if you think about it, is a very creative way to collect fingerprints.

How the implicit subsidy is calculated and why it changes every month

The implicit subsidy is not a fixed amount. It is worked out against the Saudi Contract Price, which is the international benchmark for LPG set by Saudi Aramco. When the Saudi price goes up and the government does not raise the cylinder price, the gap grows. When the Saudi price falls, the gap shrinks. According to the Petroleum Ministry’s September 2026 release, the implicit subsidy reached Rs 721 per cylinder in June 2026. That is the “more than Rs 700” in my SMS. The same release says the implicit subsidy for September 2026 is around Rs 210 per 14.2 kg cylinder. That is a drop of more than 70% in three months.

Here is a question nobody seems to ask. If the implicit subsidy can fall from Rs 721 to Rs 210 in three months, it can also fall to zero. What happens to biometric authentication then? Does the mandate disappear when Saudi prices fall? Will I get an SMS saying “Dear customer, your implicit subsidy is now zero, kindly delete your fingerprint”? And what happens when the gap goes the other way? In July 2023, the Saudi price had fallen to USD 385 per tonne from USD 732 in March, while the domestic cylinder still cost Rs 1,103 in Delhi. The Saudi price went up to USD 464 in August. Trade reports said that still left enough cushion for oil companies to cut LPG prices, although earlier losses were yet to be recovered.

I do not remember receiving an SMS in July 2023 that said “Dear customer, you are paying an implicit tax of a few hundred rupees per cylinder, kindly complete your eKYC to get it back”. The word implicit only seems to apply in one direction. There is also the question of what the benchmark covers. By the government’s own number, India imports about 60% of its LPG. The rest comes from Indian refineries and plants. Yet the implicit subsidy is measured as if every cylinder were imported at the Saudi price. Pricing domestic production at import parity is a long-standing practice in the oil industry, so I will not pretend it is new. But it does mean the subsidy partly depends on a price that a part of the gas never actually paid.

Then there is politics, which has its own formula. In August 2023, months before several state elections, the Cabinet cut the cylinder price by Rs 200, from Rs 1,103 to Rs 903. On Women’s Day in March 2024, weeks before the general election, it was cut by another Rs 100. In 2026 the price went up again, by Rs 60 in March and Rs 29 in June, according to The Wire. Each of these decisions changed the implicit subsidy overnight. So the size of the subsidy we are asked to prove with biometrics depends on Saudi Aramco, the exchange rate and the election calendar. None of these is under our control. Our fingerprints, apparently, are.

The subsidy that existed and then quietly disappeared

To be fair, there was a time when the LPG subsidy was real money. Under the PAHAL scheme, rolled out across the country in January 2015, consumers bought cylinders at market price and the government transferred the subsidy directly into their bank accounts. This was the famous Direct Benefit Transfer for LPG. Crores of consumers linked Aadhaar and bank accounts to their gas connections for it. That is also why our booking history page still has columns for Subsidy Amount, Bank Name and Bank IFSC. The plumbing was built. For a while, money actually flowed through it. Budget numbers tell the rest of the story. The LPG subsidy outlay was Rs 37,209 crore in 2018-19, which fell to Rs 24,172 crore in 2019-20, Rs 11,896 crore in 2020-21 and just Rs 1,811 crore in 2021-22.

In June 2022, the Oil Secretary said at a press briefing that no subsidy is paid on cooking gas since June 2020, except to Ujjwala beneficiaries. In November 2021, Business Standard had already reported that the Centre was bearing nil subsidy on domestic cooking gas and had passed the job of moderating prices to the oil companies. Meanwhile the price of a 14.2 kg cylinder in Delhi went from Rs 706.50 in April 2019 to Rs 1,103 in March 2023, a rise of about 56% in four years. So the subsidy stopped reaching bank accounts, the price went up and the cost of holding prices down was moved to the books of public sector oil companies. That is the blank column in our booking history.

Members of Parliament have noticed. According to TheNewsMinute, an MP asked in March 2025 whether the government would increase the subsidy for regular connections. Another MP asked in March 2026 whether it would be restored. Neither got a clear answer. The same report, from May 2026, described another SMS telling some consumers that as per income tax records their taxable income, or that of a linked family member, exceeded Rs 10 lakh and their “LPG subsidy may be discontinued”. Many of the people who received it were paying the full price already and had not seen a subsidy for years. It must be a special kind of skill to threaten to discontinue something that has already been discontinued. Comedy writers in India are struggling to keep up with the real thing.

My favourite detail is on the HP Gas website itself. When I tried to book a cylinder, the page said our Biometric Aadhaar Authentication was still pending and that it should be completed to keep receiving refills “at the regulated Retail Selling Price (RSP) with applicable subsidy”. Right above that message, the carousel still has a “Give Up Subsidy” button from the old Give It Up campaign. So we can give up a subsidy we do not receive, or we can complete biometric authentication to keep a subsidy we do not receive. Ujjwala households, to be clear, do receive a real targeted subsidy of Rs 300 per cylinder for a limited number of refills. That is an actual subsidy. What the rest of us get is the implicit kind, which is invisible until someone needs our biometrics.

Where the real money goes

None of this means the government spends nothing on LPG. It does. It just does not spend it on me directly. The government paid the oil companies Rs 22,000 crore as one-time compensation for LPG under-recoveries in 2022-23. According to the September 2026 release, it is paying Rs 30,000 crore across 2025-26 and 2026-27. The same release says the accumulated under-recoveries of the public sector oil companies on domestic LPG were over Rs 62,000 crore as of 31 August 2026. So there are two buckets of money here. One is real budget money paid to oil companies in instalments. The other is a much larger gap sitting in the books of those companies, measured against the Saudi benchmark.

Let me do some rough maths, the kind any small business owner does on the back of an envelope. The ministry says 27.43 crore consumers, or 89.9% of active domestic consumers, had completed biometric authentication by 19 September 2026. That puts the total at roughly 30.5 crore active connections. Spread Rs 30,000 crore over two years and over 30.5 crore connections and the budget support works out to roughly Rs 500 per connection per year. For a house like ours, using fewer than six cylinders a year, that is less than Rs 100 a cylinder of actual government money. Whether the implicit subsidy is Rs 721 as in June or around Rs 210 as in September, the rest is the notional part, the gap that oil companies carry and hope to recover when prices fall.

I am not complaining that the government compensates oil companies. Somebody has to, if prices are going to be held. What I find interesting is the direction of accountability. The money goes from the government to three public sector companies. The demand for proof goes from those companies to about 30 crore LPG consumers. If there is leakage in this system, it is most likely to be in the supply chain: distributors, commercial diversion and ghost connections. The oil minister himself said so in 2024, as you will see below. Yet the person asked to prove honesty is the one at the very end of the chain, standing in a kitchen, holding a phone that is trying to recognise her face.

What they actually want: your face, your finger or your iris

The SMS calls it eKYC, which sounds harmless. Everybody has done KYC somewhere. But the official name in the ministry release is Biometric Aadhaar Authentication, or BAA. The word biometric is doing a lot of work there. There are three ways to do it. You can do it at home by installing the HP Pay app along with UIDAI’s AadhaarFaceRD app, giving consent and then letting the camera scan your face while you blink and hold your head steady. You can go to the distributor’s showroom, where an executive authenticates you with a fingerprint or iris scanner. Or the delivery person can scan your fingerprint or face on his official app when he brings the cylinder.

Notice what is missing. A simple OTP to your Aadhaar-linked mobile number is not enough. UIDAI’s own authentication regulations recognise demographic authentication, OTP authentication and biometric authentication as separate modes. They leave it to the requesting entity to choose. For cooking gas, the choice is biometric. This is interesting, because in July 2024 the Petroleum Minister described the process differently. He said the delivery person could capture Aadhaar details through an app, with the customer confirming via OTP. Two years later, the same exercise needs your face, your finger or your iris. The invention, like all good inventions, has been upgraded.

And what if you do not do it? This is the elegant part of the design. Officially, you are not denied LPG. According to the ministry’s own release, consumers who do not complete biometric authentication will be supplied LPG at the market price, without any subsidy, in 5 kg or 10 kg cylinders, subject to local availability. They also have to register this choice through the oil company’s portal, app, WhatsApp chatbot or IVRS. So the alternative to biometric authentication is not another form of identification. It is a smaller cylinder at a higher price, if it is available near you. That is like a restaurant telling you the menu is optional, but if you do not order from it you can only have half a plate at double the price.

Here is the part that makes no sense even on the government’s own terms. If the only issue is the implicit subsidy, why not simply charge the market price and deliver the same 14.2 kg cylinder? In September 2026 that would have meant paying about Rs 210 more per cylinder. Charging that difference would recover the so called subsidy in full. Taking away the regular cylinder size recovers nothing at all. It only makes refusing more painful and more expensive than it needs to be. A rule that was really about the subsidy would have stopped at the price. A rule that also takes away the cylinder size seems to be about something else: making sure nobody says no.

From “no deadline” to “no 14.2 kg cylinder”

The journey to this point is a small masterpiece of policy drafting. According to the ministry, oil companies have sent more than 12 crore SMS and WhatsApp messages since October 2023 asking people to complete authentication. In July 2024, when people in Kerala were queuing at gas agencies in panic, the Petroleum Minister wrote that “there is no deadline for this activity either by Oil Marketing Companies or the Central Government”. He also said the purpose was to remove bogus customers against whose names commercial cylinders were being booked by certain distributors. He promised that the oil companies would make sure there was no hardship or inconvenience to any genuine consumer. We are genuine consumers. We would have liked that promise to mean something.

Then the deadlines started arriving anyway. The original deadline was 30 June 2026. In Hyderabad, consumers rushed to gas agencies fearing loss of government subsidy. Some said agencies refused refills until KYC was updated. An Indian Oil message later set the cutoff at 16 August 2026. After that it moved to 23 August, 31 August, 7 September and then 14 September, which was the fifth extension in less than two months. Then, on 19 September, the ministry made biometric authentication mandatory for booking regulated-price refills from 1 October 2026. So we went from “no deadline” to at least seven deadlines in about three months. In fairness, the minister did keep one promise. There is still no deadline for getting LPG. There is only a deadline for getting LPG in the size and at the price you have used all your life.

This is how most of these things work in India. Nothing is mandatory on day one. First it is advised. Then it is strongly advised. Then there is a deadline that is extended. Then there is a final deadline that is extended again. By the time it becomes mandatory, 90% of people have already done it and the remaining 10% look like troublemakers. The government can then say, quite truthfully, that almost everyone complied voluntarily. The roughly 3 crore connections still pending in September are not counted as people who had a question. They are counted as people who are late.

Aadhaar is voluntary, except when it is not

Now for the legal part, which is where the implicit subsidy really earns its name. Read the Aadhaar Act and the first thing you notice is the language of choice. Section 3 says every resident is entitled to obtain an Aadhaar number. Entitled, not required. After the 2019 amendment, Section 4(3) says an Aadhaar number holder may voluntarily use the number for authentication. Section 8 says the entity asking for authentication must take your consent and must tell you about the alternatives to submitting your identity information. A proviso added in 2019 goes further: if authentication fails because of illness, injury, age-related infirmity or technical reasons, the entity has to offer an alternate means of identification. So far, so voluntary.

UIDAI’s own regulations are even clearer. Regulation 5 says that at the time of authentication you must be told about the alternate means of identification available to you. Regulation 5(3) says no service should be denied to a resident who refuses or is unable to undergo authentication, if that resident can identify themselves through the viable alternative offered. Regulation 14 asks requesting entities to put in place exception-handling and back-up authentication mechanisms so that service delivery continues smoothly. Put all of this together and the law reads like a promise: Aadhaar is your choice, you will be told about alternatives and nobody will be left without a service because a machine did not recognise them.

The exception is Section 7. It allows the Central or State Government to require Aadhaar authentication as a condition for receiving a subsidy, benefit or service for which the expenditure comes from the Consolidated Fund. Even here, if someone does not have an Aadhaar number, they must be offered alternate and viable means of identification. A UIDAI circular of November 2019 explains how this works. A government has to issue a notification under Section 7 for each scheme and publish it in the Gazette. The circular also quotes the Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment: Section 7 benefits are welfare measures that have the colour of some kind of subsidy, with the expenditure drawn from the Consolidated Fund. It even gives the example that bodies like CBSE, NEET and UGC cannot make Aadhaar mandatory because they fall outside Section 7.

So here are my questions as a confused citizen. The 19 September 2026 release that made biometric authentication mandatory for regulated-price refills does not cite any section of any Act or any notification number. Where is the Section 7 notification for this? Is the selling price of a public sector company a subsidy paid from the Consolidated Fund, when most of the gap sits in the oil companies’ own books? If it is a Section 7 benefit, where is the alternate means of identification for people whose fingerprints fail or whose faces the app does not recognise? A 5 kg cylinder at market price is not an alternate means of identification. It is a penalty. Maybe there are good answers to all of these. I would really like to read them, ideally in a Gazette and not in a WhatsApp forward.

Why not simply amend the Aadhaar Act?

This leads to the obvious question. If the government believes Aadhaar authentication is so essential, why not amend the Aadhaar Act itself and make Aadhaar mandatory? Parliament makes laws and Parliament can amend them. If Aadhaar is meant to be compulsory, the Act should say compulsory. Parliament should debate it in the open, vote on it and let the courts test it. That is how a democracy is supposed to do difficult things. Instead we have an Act that says voluntary, regulations that say no denial of service and a steady stream of schemes, deadlines and SMS messages that make Aadhaar compulsory in practice. All of these cannot be equally true at the same time.

The likely answer is the Supreme Court. In its 2018 Aadhaar judgment, the court upheld Aadhaar for government welfare schemes but struck down mandatory linking for bank accounts and mobile connections. It also struck down the provision that let private companies demand Aadhaar. The test it applied was proportionality: is forcing biometric authentication on everyone a reasonable way to solve the problem at hand? A law that made Aadhaar authentication compulsory across the board would have to pass that test. Ghost connections and commercial diversion are real problems. But would the court accept fingerprinting 30 crore LPG consumers as the least intrusive way to catch bogus connections that distributors create? I am not a lawyer, but I have my doubts.

So, instead of a law that says you must, we have a design that says you may, but. This is the real genius of the implicit subsidy. A mandate can be challenged in court. A choice cannot, even when one option is so much worse than the other that nobody in their right mind would take it. The government never has to defend compulsion because, on paper, there is none. You chose to do biometric authentication. Nobody forced you. They only made the alternative a 5 kg cylinder that may or may not be available near you. Why amend a law when you can rename a loss?

KYC forever, scamsters never

If you are an honest Indian, your life is now one long KYC loop. You did KYC when you opened a bank account, then re-KYC every few years. You did KYC for your mutual funds, your demat account, your insurance and your SIM card. If you run a business, you do KYC for your payment gateway and then re-KYC when it decides it has forgotten you, which I wrote about in my post on payment gateways for small businesses. If you run a company, the KYC treadmill never stops. Every director has to file DIR-3 KYC with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs every three years. The company’s bank account needs its own re-KYC, separate from yours. For cooking gas, the ID and address proof we gave years ago is suddenly not enough. Now it has to be biometrics. Each time, the same honest person proves the same identity to the same system again.

Meanwhile, look at what happens on the other side. According to Ministry of Home Affairs data reported by ThePrint, Indians lost at least Rs 22,495 crore to cyber fraud in 2025. A total of 28.15 lakh cases were reported that year, but only 55,484 became formal FIRs. That is about 2%. The other 98% never got as far as an FIR. Some of those scamsters did not even need your Aadhaar card. In Karnataka, fraudsters downloaded property registration documents from the state’s Kaveri 2.0 portal, copied thumb impressions onto silicone sheets and withdrew money through Aadhaar enabled payments. It is not just one state. In Hyderabad, police arrested six people in November 2023 who had about 2,500 land registration documents on a pen drive and had made rubber clones of around 1,000 fingerprints. In Faridabad, a woman found her bank account emptied after a land sale, after fraudsters lifted fingerprints from land documents published on a government website. Every one of those withdrawals passed biometric authentication.

So the system works like this. The honest consumer with ten years of booking history and fewer than six cylinders a year must keep proving who she is. The fraudster with a silicone thumb gets authenticated in seconds, because the machine only checks whether the print matches, not whose hand it is on. As we saw earlier, the minister himself pointed at certain distributors. Distributors are licensed by the oil companies. Their bookings are on record. If the leakage is at the distributor, the obvious fix is to audit distributors. Instead, the audit is being done on 30 crore kitchens. It is a bit like a bank responding to a robbery by checking the fingerprints of every customer in the queue.

And here is the part nobody explains. Biometric authentication does not stop commercial diversion at all. It only proves that the person on the connection was present once, in front of a phone or a scanner. After that, the same person can book a cylinder at the regulated price and sell it to the tea shop down the road. Nothing in a face scan or a fingerprint prevents that. The only real controls on diversion are the ones that were already in place long before anyone mentioned biometrics: the gap between two bookings and the limit on how many cylinders a household can get in a year. A biometric check adds a lot of friction for honest families and very little friction for anyone who wants to divert.

The ghosts inside Aadhaar

There is a deeper problem with using Aadhaar to decide who is genuine. Aadhaar itself has ghosts. In 2014, an Aadhaar card was issued in Sikar district of Rajasthan in the name of Lord Hanuman, complete with a photograph of the deity and Pawan listed as the father. In June 2025, police in Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh arrested a Pakistani national who had obtained an Aadhaar card, PAN card, voter ID and Ayushman Bharat card using forged documents. In November 2025, UIDAI itself said it had deactivated more than 2 crore Aadhaar numbers of people who had died, to prevent misuse.

So the database that will decide whether a ten-year-old gas connection is genuine has, at various times, issued a card to a god, given one to a foreign national on forged papers and kept crores of dead people active. A successful biometric match proves only one thing: that the face or finger in front of the scanner matches an Aadhaar record. It says nothing about whether that record was genuine in the first place. If the goal is to weed out ghost connections, starting with a database that has its own ghosts is a curious choice. It is a bit like checking for counterfeit notes by comparing them with other notes from the same printing press.

Digital India cannot show our booking history

Here is something I find hard to understand. Our gas connection is more than ten years old. In that time we must have booked dozens of cylinders, each with an order number, a cash memo, a delivery date and an amount paid. That is exactly the data you need to know whether a household is genuine. A family that books four or five cylinders a year, at the same address, year after year, is about as genuine as a gas consumer can get. Diversion to commercial use would show up as unusual booking patterns, not as a face that the app cannot recognise. Yet, as I found, those old records are no longer shown.

So the same system that cannot show ten years of our booking history now wants biometrics to decide whether we are genuine customers. It already has the name, the address, the mobile number and the consumption pattern of our connection. It has had all of this for years. What it does not seem to have is the ability to use any of it. Digital India was supposed to mean that citizens give data once and the government uses it intelligently forever. In practice it means citizens give data again and again, the old data quietly disappears and every few years someone sends an SMS asking for something more personal than last time.

Why don’t people question this?

If you think about it, 89.9% of LPG consumers completing biometric authentication is a remarkable number. It does not mean 27 crore people read the Aadhaar Act and agreed with it. It means the system was designed so that questioning it costs more than complying. The SMS does not threaten your privacy or your rights, which are abstract. It threatens your kitchen, which is not. Nobody wants to be the person explaining to the family why there is no gas for dinner because they had a legal doubt. The delivery person is standing at your door with the app open, he has dozens more cylinders to deliver and he needs your face for 30 seconds. Saying no to him feels rude. So people say yes.

There are other reasons too. Neither the SMS nor the ministry release mentions any law, any notification or any alternative means of identification. If nobody tells you the law says Aadhaar is voluntary, you will not know there is anything to question. Those who do know are usually busy. The cost of a fight with a gas agency is a lost afternoon for a few hundred rupees. The poor, the elderly and migrant workers cannot afford even that afternoon. And once most of your neighbours have done it, the few who have not start to look like the odd ones out rather than citizens asking a fair question. That is how compliance spreads in India. Not by law, but by queue.

But here is why it matters. Every time we accept a biometric check for something this basic without asking why, the next one becomes easier to introduce. Nobody will hold a press conference announcing that Indians now need biometrics to live. It will come one SMS at a time, each with a deadline, each extended twice, each described as voluntary. The question is not whether this particular check is reasonable on its own. It is what kind of country we become if every basic service quietly comes with a scanner attached. Which brings me to a list I hope never comes true.

Coming soon: biometric authentication for everything

Some of this is already here. Farmers buying subsidised fertiliser authenticate with Aadhaar at the retailer’s point of sale machine. A MicroSave study found fingerprint mismatch to be one of the most common reasons for failure. Ration shops run on biometric machines, which is how an elderly couple in Bengaluru went months without their rations when their fingerprints stopped matching. Tatkal train tickets have needed Aadhaar authentication since July 2025. Now cooking gas needs your face. So let me imagine where the logic of the implicit subsidy could take us next. Everything on the list below carries an implicit subsidy by the government’s own logic.

• Petrol and diesel at the pump, because the government has already said it absorbs an under-recovery on every litre.
• Crossing a toll gate on a highway built with public money, with FASTag replaced by FaceTag.
• Entering a metro station, because the fare does not cover the cost of the metro.
• A general train ticket, since the railways already admit to recovering only part of the cost.
• Seeing a doctor in the OPD of a government hospital.
• Admission to a government school, followed by a monthly biometric check to make sure the child still deserves the mid-day meal.
• Drinking water from a municipal tap or a tanker in summer.
• Buying medicines at a price capped by the government, since a capped price is just an implicit subsidy with a chemist.
• Posting a letter at India Post, which has been losing money for years.
• Calling 112 for an ambulance, after the operator first sends an OTP and then asks you to blink.
• Getting a birth certificate for a newborn, who will be asked to authenticate with fingerprints that have not finished forming.
• Getting a death certificate, which will be the only certificate that finally solves the biometric failure problem.

I hope this list stays a joke. But notice that the logic behind every item is identical to the logic behind the LPG mandate. Each one is a service where the government recovers less than its full cost. Each one has some leakage, some misuse and some people who should not be getting it. If the answer to leakage in cooking gas is biometric authentication for every household, the same answer can be given anywhere. The only thing standing between this list and reality is our willingness to ask, each time, why this particular service needs our face.

Who gets hurt when the machine says no

For people like me, the cost of all this is mostly irritation. For others it is far more serious. Going by the official 89.9% figure, roughly 3 crore connections had still not completed biometric authentication in September 2026. Some of them may be duplicate or bogus connections, which is the stated purpose of the exercise. But many will be elderly people whose fingerprints have worn out, people whose faces the app cannot match with a ten-year-old Aadhaar photo, families without a smartphone that can run two apps at once, migrants whose Aadhaar mobile number has changed and people who are simply busy surviving. I saw this up close when my grandfather had to go through Aadhaar authentication at 94. Imagine him being asked to blink correctly at a phone to keep his cooking gas.

The law actually anticipated this. The 2019 proviso to Section 8 says that if authentication fails because of illness, injury, age-related infirmity or technical reasons, an alternate means of identification must be offered. But the LPG mandate offers no alternate means of identification at all. For a widow living on a pension, a smaller cylinder at a higher price is not an alternative. It is a cut in her household budget, imposed because a machine did not recognise her face. Every time such a person goes home without the regular cylinder, the implicit subsidy becomes very explicit. She pays it.

What would actually have made sense

I do not think the government is wrong to worry about leakage. Bogus connections and commercial diversion cost real money. But there were simpler ways to go after them and most of them use data the oil companies already have. First, use the booking history. A connection that has booked four or five cylinders a year at the same address for a decade does not need a face scan, while connections with unusual booking patterns can be checked one by one. Second, audit the distributors, since that is where the bogus bookings were said to happen. Third, give a real alternative to people who cannot or do not want to use Aadhaar, such as the ID and address proof already submitted when the connection was taken. Finally, if the issue really is the implicit subsidy, let those who do not authenticate pay the market price for the same 14.2 kg cylinder instead of taking away the cylinder size. None of this needs anyone’s fingerprint.

Why we are not doing it

We have not done the biometric authentication for our LPG connection and we do not plan to. The reasons are simple. Everything the oil company needs to know about us, it already has: the ID and address proof given when the connection was taken and more than ten years of bookings at the same address, under six cylinders a year, if it can still show them. Our booking history shows no subsidy transferred recently. Nobody has shown us a Gazette notification that makes biometric authentication a condition for buying cooking gas at the regulated price. Consent that comes with only one acceptable answer is not consent. I have filed an RTI and a public grievance on this. I will also take other legal measures.

I am not asking anyone to copy our decision. Your situation may be different. If you depend on Ujjwala and receive a real Rs 300 subsidy, or if a smaller cylinder at market price would hurt your budget, you may decide that 30 seconds with the delivery person is the practical choice. That is a perfectly reasonable decision. My only request is that you make it knowing what you are giving and why, rather than because an SMS said kindly complete it at the earliest. The point of this post is not to win an argument with an oil company. It is to make sure the question gets asked.

What you can do about the implicit subsidy

First, decide with your eyes open. Biometric authentication is a choice between your biometrics and a smaller, costlier cylinder. Both options are open to you, so pick the one that fits your household. Second, if you want answers, use the Right to Information Act. You can file an RTI online at rtionline.gov.in with the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, or with your oil company directly, since public sector oil companies are covered by RTI. Third, if you have been refused a refill, harassed at the agency or had your booking history disappear, file a grievance with the oil company and on the government’s CPGRAMS portal. Keep it short, factual and polite. Here are some RTI questions you can use or adapt:

• Please provide a copy of the Gazette notification under Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 that makes biometric Aadhaar authentication a condition for buying domestic LPG at the regulated Retail Selling Price.
• Please provide the definition of “implicit subsidy” used by the Ministry and the document in which it was first adopted for domestic LPG.
• Please provide the month-wise implicit subsidy per 14.2 kg cylinder from April 2023 to date, with the method of calculation, the benchmark price and the exchange rate used.
• Please state the amount of budgetary support per domestic LPG cylinder actually paid from the Consolidated Fund of India for 2025-26 and 2026-27.
• Please provide the alternate means of identification offered under the proviso to Section 8(2) of the Aadhaar Act to consumers whose biometric authentication fails due to age, illness or technical reasons.
• Please state the data retention policy for domestic LPG booking history and the reason older bookings are no longer visible to consumers on the customer portal.
• Please state how many domestic connections were found to be duplicate or diverted to commercial use through biometric authentication and how many distributors faced action for such diversion.

If you file any of these, do share the replies in the comments. A good RTI answer is worth more than a hundred opinions, including mine. If the government has a clear legal basis for all this, the replies will show it and I will happily read them. If it does not, the replies will show that too. Either way, we will know more than what an SMS tells us. That alone would be a small improvement on the current system, where the citizen is expected to know everything about the government’s requirements and the government is not expected to explain any of them.

FAQ on implicit subsidy and LPG biometric authentication

Over to you

The implicit subsidy may well be India’s most efficient invention. It costs the government nothing to rename a loss, it fits in an SMS and it has already collected the biometrics of 27 crore LPG consumers. I will admit it is clever. But clever is not the same as right. A subsidy that does not reach your bank account, that changes every month with Saudi prices and that needs your face to remain invisible deserves at least one question from every household it touches. If every Indian gets an implicit subsidy, then every Indian also has the right to ask what exactly they are being asked to prove and under which law.

Have you done the LPG biometric authentication? Did it work the first time, or did the app refuse to recognise you or someone in your family? Did your booking history also disappear? Has anyone shown you the Gazette notification behind this mandate? Do comment on the post with your experience. If you file an RTI using the questions above, share the reply here so that everyone can read it. And if any number, date or rule in this post has changed or is not correct, say so in the comments. I would rather fix the post than let a wrong detail float around.