The one-line summary of so many of the big shifts that we look at when it comes to access to assets and amenities is this: things are better than they were, but they could still get better for everyone. That's certainly the case when it comes to cooking fuel.
For my piece on what cooking fuel Indian households primarily use, I worked with my colleague Pragnya Reddy to create a time series of the cooking fuel that households reported to surveyors over time as being their main source of energy. These time series - not yet readily available - are at the heart of a lot of the work that I spotlight in this newsletter, and more often than not, Pragnya's the one who built these time series.
I found that, as evidenced by the long queues currently outside Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) distribution centres across the country, LPG is now the most widely used source of cooking fuel. Although the use of firewood and crop residue has dropped substantially, I was struck by how widespread the use of firewood remains, particularly in rural areas, where nearly half of all households used it as their primary source of cooking fuel. The use of firewood is particularly widespread among poorer families, and in India's poorer states - nearly 70% of households in Chhattisgarh, for instance, use firewood for cooking.
The other interesting finding for us was that the use of piped gas remains very narrow (just 1% of households nationally) and confined to richer urban households and particularly to the state of Gujarat.
The hardships people are experiencing with limited LPG availability are real and not to be trivialised. From a data perspective, it will be interesting to see if this drives a change in fuel usage in either direction - towards greater firewood usage, particularly among migrants forced to return home, and/ or towards more piped gas, especially in more elite urban communities. That could be a new datapoint in Pragnya's future time series.
