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At daybreak, when the air is still cold enough to sting fingertips, a narrow footpath above the Sal forest in Rajapathar Hills begins to fill with movement. First, one bundle appears, then another: long, uneven stacks of freshly cut branches, tied together with jute rope. Beneath each bundle is a woman, with her spine bent forward and feet steady on the stone-lined path.

These women leave home well before the sunrise. By the time the first golden ray hits the ridge, they have already walked for five kilometres. On days when the food is sparse, they walk even further.

In the upland villages of Dumka, Pakur and Godda in Jharkhand, where the roads are broken and markets are far away, the forest is not a place people often visit. However, it is the place that fuels their kitchen fires. Every meal, in every household, begins with the crackle of burning firewood collected from the forest.

India’s decade of clean-cooking has not changed this reality.

A transition built on paper, not kitchens

Government dashboards, on the other hand, describe a very different picture. According to administrative data collected by the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC), Jharkhand’s LPG coverage stands at 76.1% as of 2021, suggesting that the state has cleared the universal clean-cooking access threshold. However, the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5), 2019-21, states that only 31.9% of households use clean fuel as their primary cooking medium.

In villages situated on the fringes of the forest, this gap widens into a structural canon. Over the past couple months, I have observed this pattern across more than 30 villages in the Dumka-Pakur-Godda uplands while speaking to locals. Last winter, I conducted a structured household survey focusing on four representative forest-edge villages lying on the Rajapathar belt – Simardhuma, Salaipahari, Latberua, and Rajapathar — and spanning 40 households in total.

Even as 31 households, or 77.5%, had LPG connections, not a single one used it as their primary cooking fuel. Of 40 houses, only four had had their cylinders refilled at least one in the last year. A large proportion, 87.5% or 35 households, collected firewood daily, out of which 34 households had to walk more than five kilometres to do so. In all the households surveyed, the burden of firewood collection was borne entirely by women........

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