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 kitchensGovernment 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 members.The fuel mix had not changed in decades, comprising sal branches, mahua droppings, bamboo stems and dry leaves. However, what has changed is the distance to these resources. Every year, as forest edges thin and regeneration slows down, women walk miles deeper to collect wood.For these villages, the only transition is the inclusion of a cold cylinder to one corner of the kitchen, the dust shrouding it growing thicker as the days go by.‘Smoke is a part of life here’Ramprasad, medical officer at the Ramgarh Block Community Health Centre in Dumka, talks about the rise in rise in respiratory cases, while sorting winter OPD files.“Winter brings cough and breathlessness everywhere,” he says, “but in forest belts, indoor smoke is a background condition. It is so common that people don’t think of it as an illness.” After a pause, he adds, “Most symptoms get mixed with malaria, tuberculosis or mining dust. The chulha (stove) is invisible in the diagnosis.”A tribal household cooks over a wood-fired chulha while an LPG cylinder stands nearby in a forest-edge village in Jharkhand, Photo: Kulesh Bhandari.In most homes, cooking happens in low-ceiling rooms with blackened walls. Soot covers aluminium plates in greasy layers. Children hover close to the stove’s warmth with watering red eyes.The state’s push for clean-fuel does not touch these corners – not because there is an unavailability of cylinders, but because their usage has never become routine.Why women still opt for forest fuelThe reasons behind this choice are layered and none of them appear in policy documents.In most upland markets, a cylinder refill costs as much as Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,200. For families subsisting on daily wages and seasonal migration, that amount is tantamount to a week’s ration. Thus, the decision to refill cylinders becomes a financial gamble rather than a routine purchase.Delivery does not solve this problem either: ridge villages are dependent on far-away distributors and cylinders are often late, with households having to pay extra transport fees just to collect the pricey fuel they have already paid for. Many simply give up.Biomass, by contrast, is free and familiar. Mahua, sal and bamboo have been the region’s stove companions for generations; firewood cooks slow, long meals and doubles up as a heater on winter nights.Forest work is also woven into the rhythm of daily labour. Women leave with an empty jute rope and return with 20-25 kg of firewood, a load that is essential not only for cooking rice, but also for brewing rice beer, drying livestock feed and, when money is short, for selling.Set against the financial risks surrounding LPG, forest fuel’s predictability guarantees a meal. This is why the forest trail, and not cylinder vans, remains the main supply of fuel in these villages.The forest bears this cost tooFor years, forest departments have linked deforestation to timber felling and cattle grazing. Daily household extraction rarely enters conversations, and yet is an integral ecological consideration.“In Jharkhand’s sal-dominated landscapes, household extraction often appears small, but its cumulative ecological impact is significant,” says Purabi Saikia, an associate professor of Botany at the Banaras Hindu University. “Daily fuelwood, mahua, kendu and non-timber forest product collection disturbs the understory and suppresses sal sapling recruitment. Repeated lopping and selective removal alter girth-class distribution, slows natural regeneration and creates structurally open forest patches near villages,” she says.Her description matches field reality – broken saplings are strewn across trails full of exposed soil and long corridors show signs of repeated footfall. Here, forest change is not dramatic. It is gradual, patient and shaped by survival.The daily route: long, uneven, necessaryThe trails women traverse daily are rarely flat. Some have to climb two hills, while others descend rocky gullies and cross dried streams. The single route, taking two to three hours to complete, is travelled five to six times a week.A woman cooks on a traditional wood-fired chulha outside her home in rural Jharkhand. Firewood collected from nearby forests remains the primary cooking fuel for many households, Photo: Kulesh Bhandari.“We have to cross two hills to get the wood,” says Parbati Soren of Latberua village, “When money runs short, the cylinder just stays empty. Our walking keeps the stove burning.” Their work is physical, repetitive and unseen. However, even one day’s gap has immediate consequences.The region functions on a silent biomass economy built on women’s unpaid labour.Where the transition breaks downClean-fuel adoption here is not merely about affordability, but also concerns geography. Cylinder vans cannot go up ridge roads, with certain settlements requiring kilometres-long walk to reach motorable ground.There is no repair ecosystem to speak of: if a pipe leaks or a regulator breaks down, the nearest repair centre is 10-15 km away, a distance few can afford to travel for a minor fix. Electrification in many houses has not translated to clean cooking gas, a stark reminder that energy access and energy security are not one and the same.Governmental dashboards tracking connections delivered, cylinders distributed and targets achieved do not record the hours spent walking, the kilograms of firewood hauled, the saplings lost to extraction, the failing respiratory health due to smoke exposure and the seasonal pressure borne by the forest. In the uplands, the problem is not a lack of access, it is a lack of affordability, delivery and trust.The road ahead and the road women still walkThe fixes that emerge from this reporting are modest.A targeted refill subsidy of even Rs 300 to Rs 400 for forest-edge settlements would substantially reverse usage patterns. Furthermore, delivery needs to shift from block headquarters to the village level, since this last mile is precisely whether the current system collapses.A network of local energy assistants, trained in basic LPG troubleshooting, could close the repair gap significantly that sends a single faulty regulator on a 10-15 km round trip. Women’s energy cooperatives – shared refill banks, pooled transport and collective safety training – can help absorb costs that no individual household can bear alone.As Saikia’s field assessment suggests, none of this would work in isolation from forest policy: clean energy and forest rights planning need to be designed together, not as parallel lines that never meet.Until the state recognises the perilous distance walked by these women everyday, the labour invested and the forests quietly reshaped, the chulha will burn the way it always has, relying on the shoulders of the women who carry the forest home.Kulesh Bhandari is a biodiversity researcher and wildlife conservationist based in Santhal Pargana, Jharkhand. He is the founder of the Biodiversity Atlas of Santhal Pargana and an IUCN-CEM member. He writes on biodiversity and tribal ecology.