Changing regulations and a shortage of gas supply affects not only Mumbai’s bakeries, but also the demographic that relies on them for its daily bread.
Less than 300 metres from my apartment in Mumbai’s suburbs of Santacruz sits Kalina Bakery, a bakery specialising in making pav. Google Maps suggests that if I walk for a minute from the main road I frequent, I’d get to the brightly lit, tall-ceilinged room overflowing with blackened trays and the loaves of hot, crackly leavened bread. Yet, in my seven months in this locality, I did not know of its existence. Tucked behind a banal storefront selling all sorts of premade and artificially coloured celebration cakes, and accessible through a dark alleyway so slim that it only fits one person, the bakery is hidden to the unknowledgeable eye.
A similar realisation hit Heena Punwani, pastry chef and founder of Maska Bakery, when she first started her flagship Maska Walks, curated tours that guide attendees through the histories of some of Mumbai’s oldest bakeries. “Once I started [exploring], I realised that there’s a pav bakery in literally every [corner of the city], and some of them only make pav.”
The volume of bakeries reveals the scale of production: Mumbai city is home to around 750 bakeries producing pav every day, this number rising to 2,000 when the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region—consisting adjacent municipalities such as Thane, Kalyan-Dombivali, Navi Mumbai, and Vasai-Virar, among others—is included.
These bakeries produce the bread for the famed vada pav, one of the city’s most commonly eaten snacks. Pav also makes a delicious accompaniment to kheema and akuri in Mumbai’s Irani cafes. Ladis of it are ferried by vendors (called pavwala or feriwala) on bicycles to homes in nearly all of Mumbai’s neighbourhoods. Even neighbourhood kirana stores purchase pavs from bakeries, which are then loosely wrapped in newspaper and sold to customers. Any damage faced by these bakeries affects how the whole city eats.
In January 2025, the Bombay High Court ordered pav bakeries across the city to convert from using wood-fire, the primary fuel used to bake pav to liquified petroleum gas (LPG), piped natural gas (PNG), or electricity within six months, so as to curb the emission of polluting smoke. This order was passed to address a 2023 suo moto public interest litigation against Mumbai’s rising air pollution. While construction, vehicular, and industrial emissions account for the bulk of the city’s pollution (40 percent of PM2.5 emissions), bakeries contribute 3.5 percent—a small but, according to some, not negligible amount. The impact of this court order on the bakeries and the pav they produce has been multifold.
Ovens Going Cold
I snaked through Bandra’s Bazar Road to reach D’Costa Bakery, arriving at the sweet-and-sour funk of fermented dough. On the other side of glass panes lay chocolate rum balls, chicken and mutton rolls, and creamy savoury puffs. Behind the counter, ladis of round pav, lightly golden, sat atop shelves. Between tending to customers’ orders, the bakery’s owner, Ehsaan Khan, whose family has been running the bakery since the 1930s, tells me, “If things progress like they are, there will be no bread in Mumbai’s future.”
Ehsaan adds, “Earlier we used to make a lot of pav—around 10,000 per day. Now I have a gas oven, which is very expensive, and the cost has more than doubled. We make between 500 to 1,000 pavs a day using gas. We’ve had to stop selling pavs to feriwalas.”
While monthly expenditure on wood ranged from rupees 25,000–40,000 depending on the size of the bakery, the cost of LPG is roughly three to four times more. Such a drastic shift to a fundamental part of the city’s sustenance cannot happen without state support, Ehsaan maintains.
Consistent across the city’s bakeries is the sentiment that they’ve been left to fend for themselves. Along with the increased cost of fuel, there are also the expenses of demolishing the existing bhatti (wood-fired oven) and installing a gas or electric oven. In an interim application asking for more time and assistance in implementing the change, a collective of bakeries agreed on the importance of moving toward ‘cleaner’ fuel; however, many lacked the capital to do so. Some were also unable to access the more affordable option of PNG, as there simply were no existing pipelines in their area. While many bakeries have applied to Mahanagar Gas Ltd. (the leading supplier of PNG in Mumbai) for PNG pipelines, they have received no positive response yet.
“They told me it’ll happen when it happens,” he says. “But this is a slum area, so gas lines aren't laid [here] because demolition keeps happening [in slums].”
Among the applicants is Paradise Bakery in Sunder Nagar, Colaba, first built in 1890, which sells the pav it makes out of its open storefront. Mazukh Khan, who currently looks after the bakery’s small-scale operations, tells us he applied for a PNG connection last year and filed a complaint with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) when no progress had been made. “They told me it’ll happen when it happens,” he says. “But this is a slum area, so gas lines aren’t laid [here] because demolition keeps happening [in slums].”
While the shift was difficult for Paradise Bakery, it proved fatal when LPG prices in India soared in March this year due to the US-led war on West Asia. “The government’s order came to demolish the bhatti, so we demolished [it] and put in an oven. Now there is the issue of gas. Our system has been closed for eight to nine days,” Mazukh says. The cost of demolishing the bhatti was rupees 2,00,000 to 3,00,000, and installing a new gas oven was around rupees 5,00,000.
With Paradise’s bakery shut, Mazukh has to source pav from another bakery (other bakeries who had not yet demolished their woodfired ovens were able to return to the traditional method of baking pav when the gas crisis grew grave). The pav only reaches his shop at 9 am, and is a little cold and squished. In the early mornings, when sales of pav are highest, he is forced to turn away hungry customers.
Who Eats Pav, and Who Suffers the Real Cost
Most bakeries haven’t had the time nor the state support to implement a system incorporating the new fuel. As per LPG cylinder storage safety rules, only around five cylinders can be stored at a time. According to Kalina Bakery’s Samsujjama Seth, who has been managing the till for over 30 years, this risks the dough being wasted. If they run out of fuel, dough that has been resting might overproof: “Once the yeast is added, and the microbes puff the dough up, it must go into the furnace. If it doesn’t get heat … the pav will be ruined. It’ll be a complete loss.”
Despite the crises plaguing pav producers, the price of the pav has remained unchanged. There is a reason for that, Mazukh says—a price hike will negatively affect the customers, a significant portion of whom belong to the working class.
“It’s that fundamental of roti-kapda-makaan, right?” says Chef Heena, referring to the popular Hindi saying that asserts the three essential requirements for survival and dignity: bread, clothing, shelter. “In Mumbai, roti is pav.” While the cost of a ladi might vary slightly by region, the going rate for one pav is rupees 3. With pav remaining fresh for only half a day, customers are purchasing their immediate sustenance.
At Kalina Bakery in March this year, an LPG-led shortage of pav in the area meant Samsujjama had to refuse more than eight customers in a span of 30 minutes. Some, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, took a few stale pieces of bread left over from an earlier batch.
While talking to Mazukh, a daily wage worker arrived, asking for only one pav. Mazukh posited that the sole piece of bread would be accompanied by a side dish to make a full meal. Ehsaan articulates what is observed across bakeries clearly: “It is not the rich eating pav every day. It is the poor, it is the city’s middle classes.” In their interim application, bakeries predict that the rising costs faced by them would have an inflationary effect on the working class.
Chef Gresham Fernandes, head chef at Bandra Born—a Mumbai-based restaurant revamping dishes and flavours from the neighbourhood he grew up in—understands the need for a change in baking methods. With apartment buildings rising higher and little provision for regulating the wood used in baking, smoke from chimneys might pose a hazard to neighbouring residents. However, he also understands the role pav plays in making the city more accessible. “Take the misal pav. It’s essentially a very thin, spicy gravy thickened with farsan [fried snacks made out of chickpea flour]. It travels, there is more body to it, [and when paired with pav,] you have instant access to calories,” he says, referring to the value of such foods to the labour class.
Day-old pav became breadcrumbs, providing a crispy exterior to fried cutlets and succulent pieces of fish, while his grandmother would make bread sauce: thin stocks thickened with bread, enabling a hearty meal.
In Chef Gresham’s childhood home too, the pav would go a long way. Fresh naram pav was most often eaten with eggs, and kadak pav was used to sop up gravies. With the East Indian preparation of pork vindaloo, the absorbent pav was the ideal vessel for the tangy yet deep and fatty stew. But the real ingenuity lay in the use of stale bread. Day-old pav became breadcrumbs, providing a crispy exterior to fried cutlets and succulent pieces of fish, while his grandmother would make bread sauce: thin stocks thickened with bread, enabling a hearty meal.
When asked what was fundamental to the pav from his childhood, Chef Gresham insists that the variation in baking method—woodfired, gas, or electric—causes barely perceptible changes in flavour and texture. Chef Heena qualifies this: unless the smoke touches the pav, the pav comes in direct contact with the stone hearth, or it has a charred finish, the flavour is unlikely to be very different; the bakeries, though, maintain that woodfired pav has a deeper, smokier taste. According to Chef Gresham, what determines the characteristics of pav—an earthy, fermented taste, a chewy yet soft texture with plenty of give—are factors such as how much old dough is added, how it is kneaded, how temperature is maintained. In short, it is the skills that go into making pav that primarily inform its flavour.
In every pav bakery, this mastery is entirely apparent: each of the workers are skilled in one part of the baking process. Sonu Khan, 24, has been baking pav at Bandra’s Dias Bakery for 10 years now. Having moved from Uttar Pradesh’s Gonda district to Mumbai to work in a bakery, he understands the assembly line required to make pav intimately. He started off by being the patra wala, which involves learning how to stack the empty and filled trays, and is the role given to the youngest and least experienced workers in the bakery. The gutli wala shapes the dough, while the bhatti wala—Sonu’s current role—inserts and removes the filled trays from the oven using a nearly 10-feet-long paddle, considered the most intricate and difficult task of the lot. “[The bhatti wala] needs to understand when the dough has proofed enough and is worth putting into the oven. He should understand the fire well enough to know when to take the pav out,” Sonu shares.
Chef Heena marvels at this repository of skill: “They’re not working with thermometers or proofers, yet every day you go into the bakery, the pav is exactly the same. It’s artisanal.” Like most daily-wage work in the city, the work is undervalued, and underpaid. Shifts in bakeries last between 8 and 12 hours, for the majority of which workers are on their feet, toiling in front of hot ovens expelling steam at high temperatures. A standard bakery shift for Sonu is 12 hours, though he sometimes works the night shift. The longest shift he’s worked lasted for 36 hours.
Workers often migrate from states such as Uttar Pradesh to do this trade, suffering cramped living conditions in Mumbai. In these ways, the realities surrounding pav are contradictory: while the bread is ubiquitous, its production is rarely seen or acknowledged; while great skill is required to make it, workers receive minimum compensation; and while the working class of the city relies on it, they are the first to get priced out.
Oishika Roy is an editor and writer with a keen interest in understanding our relationships with food, and what they reveal about the world. She is the Features Editor at The Locavore.
Sarthak Chand is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work lies at the intersection of migration, identity, gender, culture, history, and architecture. He is the founder of The Gonzo Studio, dedicated to producing and publishing stories that reflect India’s evolving social fabric.
Make pork vindaloo at home with this recipe by Gresham Fernandes.
This article has been published as a part of The Locavore’s collaboration with Powerhouse Museum, Australia. Titled Setting The Table: Stories from India’s Food Cultures, it aims to highlight diverse undertold stories about India’s culinary landscape to a non-native reader, adding texture to global narratives about Indian food.
