India’s Fuelwood: Historical Evolution, Policy Perspectives and the Transition to Clean Cooking Energy

Dr. Sushil Kumar Singla

For more than a century, India’s household energy story has been quietly unfolding in village kitchens. Long before electricity reached rural homes and decades before Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) became synonymous with clean cooking, millions of Indian families depended on cow dung cakes, crop residues and fuelwood collected from nearby forests. Today, following one of the world’s largest clean cooking initiatives, LPG has become the dominant household cooking fuel. Yet this remarkable transition is not merely a story of technological change—it is the outcome of nearly a century of evolving agricultural policy, forest management and public health interventions.

Ironically, the origins of this journey can be traced back not to the modern clean energy movement but to the colonial administration’s concern over declining soil fertility.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, cow dung cakes constituted one of the principal cooking fuels in rural India. While they provided an inexpensive source of household energy, agricultural scientists increasingly argued that burning dung deprived Indian agriculture of valuable organic manure. Every dung cake burnt in the kitchen represented nutrients that never returned to the soil.

Against this backdrop, the British administration convened a Fuelwood Conference during the 1930s, where an important policy direction emerged. Rather than burning cow dung, it was argued that dung should be retained for agricultural use, while household energy requirements should increasingly be met through fuelwood obtained from forests. The objective was straightforward: improve agricultural productivity without compromising rural energy security.

Although largely forgotten today, this decision significantly influenced India’s approach towards household energy and forest management for decades.

The idea that forests should supply rural energy needs continued after Independence. The Forest Policy of 1894 had already recognized that forests producing fuelwood, grazing resources and small timber were essential for meeting local requirements. However, independent India institutionalized this thinking through the National Forest Policy of 1952, which acknowledged that diversion of forests without adequate planning deprived villages of fuelwood and small timber while contributing to ecological degradation. The policy recommended the establishment of Village Forests, popularly described as Fuel Forests, specifically to provide firewood, fodder, fencing material and small timber to surrounding communities. It further emphasized that harvesting should remain within the annual regenerative capacity of forests and encouraged local Panchayat participation in forest management.

The National Forest Policy of 1988 expanded this approach by linking forest conservation with people’s participation. Recognizing that fuelwood remained the principal household energy source in rural India, the policy called for large-scale afforestation programmes to augment fuelwood supplies while reducing pressure on natural forests.

These successive policies reveal an important historical reality: for much of the twentieth century, India’s forests were not viewed merely as ecological assets but also as the country’s largest decentralized source of household energy.

Fuelwood persisted because it made economic sense for millions of rural households. Unlike commercial fuels, fuelwood could often be collected from nearby forests and common lands without direct monetary expenditure. Although gathering wood demanded considerable time and labour—primarily from women and children—it minimized household cash expenses. For low-income families with irregular earnings, this economic logic outweighed the hidden costs of indoor air pollution or environmental degradation.

This explains why India’s transition towards clean cooking has never followed a simple replacement model. Even households possessing LPG connections frequently continue to use firewood for preparing traditional meals requiring prolonged cooking or during periods when purchasing LPG refills becomes financially difficult. Energy economists describe this phenomenon as fuel stacking, where households simultaneously use multiple energy sources depending upon affordability, availability and cooking requirements.

National surveys clearly demonstrate how dramatically India’s household energy landscape has changed over the past fifteen years. According to the NSSO Report No. 542 (2009–10), nearly 76.3 per cent of rural households depended primarily on firewood and wood chips for cooking, whereas only 11.5 per cent used LPG. In urban India, LPG had already become the dominant cooking fuel, serving 64.5 per cent of households, while 17.5 per cent still relied on firewood.

By the NSS 76th Round (2018), the transition had accelerated substantially. Rural LPG adoption increased to 48.3 per cent, marginally exceeding dependence on firewood, chips and crop residues (44.5 per cent). Urban LPG usage climbed to 86.6 per cent, while firewood use declined sharply to 5.6 per cent. Nationally, LPG accounted for 61.4 per cent of primary cooking fuels, whereas firewood, chips and crop residues declined to 31.2 per cent.

The trend has continued. According to the Comprehensive Annual Modular Survey (CAMS) 2022–23, 63.4 per cent of Indian households were using clean cooking fuels such as LPG, natural gas, electricity and solar energy. Nevertheless, rural India still lagged considerably, with only 49.3 per cent of households using clean fuels compared with 92.9 per cent in urban areas. As a result, more than one-third of Indian households continued depending upon traditional biomass fuels.

The latest analysis based on the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) 2023–24 indicates that approximately 60 per cent of Indian households now primarily cook using LPG, while nearly 33 per cent continue depending on firewood. These figures represent one of the most significant household energy transitions in independent India.

A decisive turning point came with the launch of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) in May 2016. Designed to provide free LPG connections to poor households dependent on traditional cooking fuels, the programme sought to improve women’s health, reduce indoor air pollution and ease the burden of fuelwood collection. More than 90 million households received LPG connections, and national LPG coverage expanded from 62 per cent in 2016 to almost universal coverage by 2021.

The benefits have been substantial. Cleaner cooking fuels have reduced exposure to household air pollution associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, lung cancer and cardiovascular illnesses. Women and children, who traditionally bore the burden of fuel collection and smoke exposure, have emerged as the primary beneficiaries of the clean cooking transition.

While considerable research has examined the health benefits of clean cooking fuels, surprisingly little attention has been paid to an equally important question: What has happened to India’s forests as dependence on fuelwood declines?

For generations, rural households regularly removed dry branches, fallen trees, twigs and leaf litter from nearby forests for domestic use. This continuous extraction, though driven by household necessity, also removed a significant portion of combustible biomass from forest floors.

As fuelwood dependence decreases, these materials increasingly remain inside forests. This raises important ecological questions. How does reduced biomass removal influence nutrient cycling, forest regeneration and biodiversity? Does greater accumulation of dry woody biomass contribute to increasing forest fire intensity under changing climatic conditions? To date, these questions have received limited scientific attention and deserve systematic investigation.

India’s clean cooking transition should therefore be evaluated not only through the lens of public health and energy access but also through its long-term ecological consequences.

From fuelwood to biochar: the next transition

The decline in household fuelwood demand also presents an opportunity. Instead of allowing excess forest biomass to accumulate and potentially increase wildfire risk, India could adopt scientific biomass management strategies. Dry branches, fallen wood and forest litter collected through sustainable forest management programmes can be converted into biochar using controlled pyrolysis.

Such an approach offers multiple benefits. Biochar can serve as a low-emission renewable fuel, providing an alternative clean energy source in regions where complete LPG dependence remains economically difficult. More importantly, biochar can be incorporated into soils or blended with conventional fertilizers to produce bio-based soil amendments that improve soil organic carbon, water retention and nutrient-use efficiency.

For a country that continues to spend substantial resources on fertilizer imports, integrating biochar into fertilizer formulations could strengthen India’s circular bioeconomy while simultaneously improving soil health and reducing carbon emissions. It would also create rural enterprises centred on biomass processing, generating employment while reducing combustible material inside forests.

India’s fuelwood transition reflects more than changing household energy preferences. It mirrors a century of evolving public policy—from the colonial recognition that cattle dung belonged in agricultural fields rather than cooking stoves, to independent India’s forest policies promoting village fuelwood plantations, and finally to modern clean cooking programmes that have transformed millions of lives.

The next stage of this transition should move beyond the simple objective of replacing one cooking fuel with another. Policymakers should invest in understanding how declining fuelwood extraction is reshaping forest ecosystems, biodiversity and wildfire dynamics. Simultaneously, India should develop a national strategy for the scientific utilization of surplus forest biomass through biochar and biofertilizer production.

The story of India’s fuelwood transition, therefore, is far from complete. It began with concerns over agricultural productivity, evolved into a programme for rural energy security and has now become a public health success. Its future may lie in something even more ambitious: building a circular bioeconomy where cleaner kitchens, healthier forests and more productive soils reinforce one another.

(The author is an IFS, Secretary , Environment Science Technolgy & Climate Change, Govt Of Himachal Pradesh. Views are personal.)

First published in The Economic Times.