Certain villages in India are used to using natural gas in their daily cooking. The gas shortages, occurring across the countryside, however, is forcing many villagers to find alternative means of cooking their foods. The main alternative fuel seems to be wood from the nearby forests.

No where is this more true than in the rural country of Himachal Pradesh. As more and more villagers make use of firewood from the forests, however, the deforestation is putting stress on the surrounding environment in ways that threaten the viability of the ecosphere.

The conventional way that gas reaches teh villagers is through what are called LPG cylinders. LPG is short for liquefied petroleum gas. A problem with these cylinders is that they don’t exactly have a stellar safety record. The main reason is that if incorrectly sotred, LPG is a fire and explosion hazard. In point of fact, a majority of the fires in the country are caused directly or indirectly by the improper storage of unsafe LPG cylinders.

Because of the inherent dangers, the government has stepped up it’s measures to monitor and control the quality of these canisters. While this is obviously a good thing, the attention to quality control has inadvertently exacerbated problem by decreasing the amount of gas that can be delivered to the villagers in time.

However, if the LPG cylinders fail to reach the villagers in an acceptable amount of time, they have no other choice than to take what they need from the nearby forest.

One of the possible solution to the problem that many people are pushing is to regulate, by household, the amount of cooking gas that is delivered.

Regardless of the eventual answer to this problem, hopefully it will come soon, before the forest areas have been ravaged beyond remedy.

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