Fuel Choices in Urban Indian Households

This paper applies an ordered discrete choice framework to model fuel choices and patterns of cooking fuel use in urban Indian households. The choices considered are for three main cooking fuels: firewood, kerosene and LPG (liquid petroleum gas). The models, estimated using a large microeconomic dataset, show a reasonably good performance in the prediction of households’ primary and secondary fuel choices. This suggests that ordered models can be used to analyze multiple fuel use patterns in the Indian context. The results show that lack of sufficient income is one of the main factors that retard households from using cleaner fuels, which usually also require the purchase of relatively expensive equipments. The results also indicate that households are sensitive to LPG prices. In addition to income and price, several sociodemographic factors such as education and sex of the head of the household are also found to be important in determining household fuel choice. * Corresponding author: Dr. Shonali Pachauri, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria. Tel: +43 2236 807 475 Fax: +43 2236 71313 Email: [email protected]