Abstract
The major efforts and their limitations to formulate rural domestic energy requirements in India are discussed. Results of some of the recent efforts for quantifying biofuel consumption in rural areas are presented thereafter. Emphasis in this paper is on the recent efforts to collate and analyze results of energy consumption survey of 638 villages covering over 39,000 households. These are used to estimate biofuel use for different agro-climatic regions in India by estimating consumption at the district level in the rural domestic sector. The results are aggregated at the state level and they are compared with other estimates for India. The range of consumption aggregated at the national level is found to vary widely (93-252 million tonnes/yr of firewood, 54-107 million tonnes/yr of animal waste and 36-99 million tonnes/yr of agricultural residues). Reasons for the wide disparity in the results is briefly discussed.
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