Price hike in cooking gas no issue for this Kerala woman. She owns a methane well

By Biju E Paul|

Express News Service |

Published: 27th February 2020 06:37 AM

Rathnamma lights the gas stove connected to the borewell | Express

ALAPPUZHA: The prices of LPG cylinders have been rising all the time — the latest hike happening a fortnight ago — forcing homemakers to tweak their family budget time and again. But Rathnamma at Arattuvazhi village in Kerala’s Alappuzha district is not sweating over the prices, unlike her neighbours. She doesn’t have to, when she is sitting on her own gas deposit in her compound.

The methane gas which she has been using for cooking for the last nine years comes from a borewell she dug. And she is the cynosure of her neighbours’ envy. Rathnamma, 66, engaged workers on October 7, 2011, to be precise, to dig the borewell in her compound for clean drinking water, which was not readily available in the marshy terrain. “They kept working, but even after digging to a depth of 75 ft, what we were left with was only dirty water.

"I got upset and even had an argument with them over their competence. We decided to stop the work for the time being and I asked the workers to close the well’s mouth using a PVC cap. When they lighted a match stick as part of the work, we were shocked to find uninterrupted flame at the mouth of the well,” Rathnamma said.

“Tension gave way to relief and fun when the plumber brought quality pipes and connected the well’s mouth with my LPG stove. I made black coffee for all and we all drank it happily,” Rathnamma recalled the day. Still, she found it tough to convince her husband who came back from his shop in the night.

Rathnamma has been saving Rs 5,000 per year

“My husband (Rameshan) came to know about all these developments only after he returned from the shop. Whether the gas would pose a danger to us and our neighbours was his major worry. He also expressed doubt even about the chances of an explosion, which made me really tense. I sniffed in and around the stove, but there wasn’t any smell. I couldn’t sleep that night and kept buckets of water near the stove, thinking I would douse the fire using it in case of a blast. But nothing happened.

“The plumber returned next morning and we made tea and cooked food using the gas. Neither was there any smell and nor any taste difference to the food we made. Since then, I’ve been relying on the natural gas well,” said Rathnamma. The news spread and people started coming to see the ‘gas well’. Officials from the Geological Survey of India inspected the well and site twice and said the gas is odourless methane. Though they had arrived with heavy equipment, they could not identify any bulk gas deposit in the area.

An ONGC team also carried out tests, but concluded the same. Rameshan said some other residents too had identified the presence of gas in the area, but were not ready to use the gas for cooking. But he has been saving at least Rs 5,000 per year. Experts had said the gas supply would stop after weeks, but Rathnamma has been lucky for nearly a decade.