Fuel Choices in Urban Indian Households

Abstract

This paper applies an ordered logit model to fuel choices and patterns of cooking fuels in urban Indian households. A large microeconomic dataset is employed to carry out the analysis. The results show that in addition to income, there are several socio-demographic factors such as education and sex of the head of the household, which are important in determining household fuel choice. In addition, the model performs better when information on the shares of different fuels in total useful cooking energy are included, and this suggests that it is important to incorporate multiple fuel use patterns in modeling fuel choice in the Indian context.