In the forested district of Mandla in Madhya Pradesh, Kumar Lal Uladhi pursues a livelihood handed down through generations, emblematic of rural India’s enduring struggle for affordable cooking fuel.
A headloader by trade, Uladhi gathers firewood from forests near his village, Tintni, and walks nearly 10 kilometres to Mandla town to sell it, often barefoot. By avoiding transport, he saves about Rs 40 a day—almost half the daily expenses of his five-member household, he says.
Some days he returns with his bundle unsold; on better ones, he earns Rs 100-150 per bundle. On average, he sells three to four bundles a week, bringing home Rs 400-500. Collecting firewood has long provided both subsistence and free cooking fuel for Uladhi, who has supported his son’s family since the latter’s death three years ago. His widowed daughter-in-law, Ramkali Uladhi, supplements the household income with daily-wage work. Still the family cannot afford liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)—the clean cooking fuel widely used in India. “A private LPG connection is unthinkable for us,” says Uladhi, adding that he applied for one under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) three years ago but has yet to receive it.
PMUY, a flagship scheme launched by the Union government in May 2016, aims to provide clean cooking fuel such as LPG to “rural and deprived households” that would otherwise rely on polluting alternatives such as firewood, coal and cow-dung cakes. Beneficiaries receive an LPG stove and their first cylinder free of charge; subsequent refills are subsidised (for 2025-26, a targeted subsidy of Rs 300 per 14.2 kg cylinder is provided for up to nine refills per year). According to the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell, under the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MoPNG), some 103.4 million beneficiaries are covered under PMUY as of January 1, 2026.
In February, over a fortnight, Down To Earth (DTE) travelled through 15 villages to examine two questions. One, why despite the impressive reach of PMUY, 56.1 per cent of the country’s rural population still relies on firewood, dung cake and other forms of biomass. That figure comes from the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted in 2019-21, which also notes that exposure to household smoke, whether from solid cooking fuels or tobacco, has harmful health effects. Data from the National Sample Survey Office’s (NSSO’s) 78th round Multiple Indicator Survey, released in 2020-21, tells a similar story: more than 46 per cent people in rural India continue to cook with biomass.
Two, DTE also sought to understand why energy- and mobility-related expenses in rural household budgets have increased in recent years, even as overall consumption remains modest, as shown in NSSO’s House-hold Consumption-Expenditure surveys. Spending on energy has, in fact, grown faster than spending on food. Monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) on energy and related services (fuel, lighting and conveyance) rose from Rs 174, or 12 per cent of the total expenditure, in 2011-12, to Rs 565 or 13.7 per cent of the total expenditure in 2023-24. This was an increase of 224 per cent in a little over 10 years. By comparison, spending on food rose by 156 per cent over the same period. DTE’s reporting took it through …
This article is part of the cover story Caught in the energy gap published in the April 16-30, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth