Nostalgia hits hard: The kerosene stove is back and this time nobody asked for it

India has reintroduced kerosene for household use and coal for commercial kitchens as the escalating West Asia conflict shuts the Strait of Hormuz, forcing the country to reach back to fuels it had spent a decade trying to leave behind.

As an escalating conflict in West Asia shut the Strait of Hormuz for 13 consecutive days , unprecedented in recorded history according to Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, the government has quietly reversed one of its most symbolic clean-energy achievements. Kerosene is back on state allocation lists. Coal has returned to hotel and restaurant kitchens. The fuels of a previous era are back, not as nostalgia, but as necessity .

The irony cuts deep. The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana spent years handing free LPG connections to over eight crore households below the poverty line, pulling women away from smoky chulhas, retiring the kerosene stove to the storeroom, promising a cleaner future. Delhi was declared India's first kerosene-free city in 2014 . That storeroom is now being revisited. "This temporarily reverses our stated objective of phasing out the fuel," an Oil Ministry official quietly acknowledged.

The Strait, a 33-kilometre passage between Iran and Oman, carried 55 per cent of India's LPG and nearly half its crude. When it closed, the government released an additional 48,000 kilolitres of kerosene , a 48 per cent jump and the first quota increase in over a decade. Crematoriums, ceramic units, hotel kitchens and even the Delhi High Court canteen have been scrambling for alternatives.

On the ground, the scramble has taken on a quietly surreal quality. Restaurants that had run on clean commercial LPG for years are pulling out angithis and wood-fired chulhas from storage, some dusted off after more than a decade of disuse. Hotel kitchens that once ran on precise gas-controlled flames are now managing coal fires, their chefs relearning heat in a way no culinary school ever taught. College hostels, long accustomed to electric and gas-fitted mess halls, are improvising with kerosene stoves and biomass burners to keep thousands of students fed. "I haven't seen coal in my kitchen in fifteen years," said a Lucknow dhaba owner. "My father used it. Now I am using it again."

Outside dealerships, panic queues formed. The government raised LPG prices, extended refill intervals, and expanded anti-hoarding measures. Yet the free market found its own answer, with induction cooktop sales surging 300 per cent and Amazon India reporting a 30-fold spike in 24 hours . One generation reaches back. Another leaps forward.

Behind it all, India's 40-country crude network and a 28 per cent jump in domestic LPG production have prevented a far worse crisis. The chai still gets made. The stove just looks different this week.