Rabinjyoti Khataniar

Household Energy Consumption in India and Eastern Himalayas: Social and Economic Dimensions Rabinjyoti Khataniar

Recently, it has been recognized widely that biomass fuels are the fundamental sources of rural energy and important reason of deforestation around the World. The extreme dependency of the people on biomass fuels can be attributed to a numbers of factors such as their food habit, livelihood strategy, easy access to the forest resources, poor communication facilities, non-availability of other type of fuels at a reasonable price, etc. However, very little academic literatures address these issues. This study, therefore, enlightens the role of bio-mass fuels as a household energy supplier, the degree of variability in bio-fuels consumption among different socio-economic groups of peoples. The empirical specification of the theoretical model shows the relative significance of different variables in determining a particular type of fuel consumption. The study is expected to shed some light on impact of fuel-wood consumption and availability of alternate sources of energy, as such should be especially helpful to the professionals and policy makers towards sustainable energy policy and environmental conservation.