March 27, 2026
The fuel crisis pushing India in different directions
Rural India is going back to fuelwood. Urban India is getting on the bus. Same crisis, different responses.
Image by Hiki Liu on Unsplash
What's happening?
- The ongoing fuel crisis driven by the US-Israel-Iran war has reached our daily lives in India. But the response looks very different depending on where you live.
- In rural India, families are falling back on fuelwood. States like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Kerala are reporting steep rises in fuelwood use as LPG becomes scarce and expensive. We have spent decades moving people away from firewood to LPG as cleaner fuel. Using firewood is bad for indoor air quality and unsustainable collection may cause deforestation at scale.
- In cities like Nagpur, people are ditching private vehicles for public buses and the metro. Nagpur's Aapli Bus system as well as its metro has seen a jump in ridership over the last few days.
Why should you care?
- The fuelwood shift is a health crisis in the making. Indoor air pollution from burning wood kills lakhs of Indians every year and the burden falls mostly on women and children who collect and cook with it.
- The bus and metro story may actually be good news. When fuel gets expensive, people switch to public transport and it may just prove that public transport works and nudge more people to make that choice.