India's LPG Crisis: How Your Food Bill, Office Canteen, and Delivery App Are Impacted

If you've been asked to carry a lunchbox to the office lately, or you're seeing pooris and dosas quietly disappear from canteen menus, you're not imagining things.

Add fewer discounts on food delivery apps and a slow creep in your monthly food bill, and a pattern starts to form. It all traces back to one thing: LPG.

It starts far away, but it hits very close to home

The trigger is in West Asia.

Tensions in the region and disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz, through which 80–90% of India's LPG imports pass, have tightened global supply. India imports nearly 60% of its LPG needs, so even a short disruption shows up domestically, fast.

And India's buffer is thin: roughly 2–3 weeks of demand. The system doesn't have much slack.

Prices reflect this. Domestic LPG cylinders now cost around ₹913 in Delhi, ₹912.5 in Mumbai, and ₹939 in Kolkata. In Patna, it's crossed ₹1,000. Commercial cylinders used by restaurants and food businesses jumped ₹114.5 to roughly ₹1,884.5 in Delhi.

But prices are just the surface. The real story is how this shortage is changing behaviour across sectors.

Households: protected, but still feeling it

The government has prioritised domestic supply. New rules enforce 25-day booking gaps for urban households and 45-day gaps in rural areas. Homes with piped gas connections have had LPG access restricted.

So supply to households is being managed. But the indirect hit still comes through.

When restaurants and food vendors face higher fuel costs, those costs get passed on. Whether you cook at home or order in, LPG is quietly lifting your expenses.

Offices: the part nobody anticipated

Across Pune and Bengaluru, IT companies like Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and Wipro have been scaling down canteen services because vendors can't get enough LPG.

At Infosys Pune, employees were told to bring tiffins. Campus catering was discouraged. At TCS:

• Pune's Yerawada campus cut down to dal-rice
• Bengaluru's Whitefield campus went to lemon rice and sandwiches, with staff asked to bring food from home

Cognizant shut multiple live counters. Wipro's Hinjewadi campus cut fast food and Chinese stations entirely.

The people hardest hit are in PGs, hostels, and shared flats, and employees who depend on canteens because cooking at home isn't realistic for them. In Pune alone, roughly 2–3 lakh IT employees from other states rely on canteens or nearby eateries. Some employer groups have reportedly started pushing hybrid or work-from-home arrangements specifically because food access has become difficult.

Restaurants and cloud kitchens: squeezed from both sides

Restaurants are dealing with higher costs and unreliable supply at the same time.

The adjustments are visible: dropping gas-intensive dishes, shrinking menus, prioritising dine-in over delivery, and slowly nudging prices up.

Cloud kitchens are in a harder spot. They run on 5–10% margins, and LPG is their biggest input cost. Around 85% of independent restaurants on delivery platforms are heavily LPG-dependent, according to industry estimates. A small cost increase has nowhere to go.

Food delivery platforms: the impact arrives late, but it arrives

Swiggy and Zomato don't burn LPG. Their restaurant partners do.

When restaurants slow down, the platforms feel it. Analyst estimates suggest a week-long disruption could shave around 3% off quarterly revenue for food delivery platforms. Stretch it to a month, and EBITDA could fall by roughly 21% for Swiggy and 16% for Zomato.

On the ground, it's already showing: fewer delivery options, smaller discounts, and marginal price increases. Delivery partners are reporting fewer orders per day; income takes a direct hit since pay is per delivery. One partner in Pune reported his daily earnings dropping from around ₹1,600 to about ₹600.

The part nobody's talking about: fertilisers and food prices

LPG and natural gas are closely linked. The shortage is also hitting fertiliser production — Indian companies have cut output, and since India is the world's largest urea importer, that pressure could push global urea prices higher.

Food systems, from farming inputs through processing, account for roughly 30% of global energy consumption. A prolonged gas disruption shows up as higher input costs for farmers, then higher food prices, then a change in what people buy and how often they eat out. That loop takes time, but it runs.

The bottom line

What started as a supply disruption in West Asia is now showing up in office canteen menus, food delivery pricing, and monthly household bills. It's not dramatic. It's a missing menu item, a slightly higher delivery charge, a thinner paycheck for someone on a bike. But the chain connecting all of it is longer than it looks.