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Paper examines domestic energy supply and demand in Northwest India. A household model is set up to analyse the links between forest scarcity and household energy consumption, focusing on the substitution of fuels from the forests and commons and the private domain. The model is estimated using recently collected data from villages bordering Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, India. A novel maximum entropy approach is used for estimation. It is found that fuelwood collection time, household endowments of land, labor, livestock and trees and village-level indicators of forest stock, access and management are significant for explaining fuel mix at the household level. Thus, households respond to forest scarcity and increased fuelwood collection time by substituting fuels from private sources for forest fuelwood. However, the magnitude of the response appears to be too small to prevent current fuelwood collection practices from causing serious forest degradation. [author]
