Villagers Forced to Use Firewood As Natural Gas Runs Out

October 29th, 2009 | by real |

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.

This is especially true in the Himachal Pradesh area. 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 the 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. That’s because LPG, if stored incorrectly, is a fire and explosion hazard. In fact, most of the fires in the country are caused either directly or indirectly by improperly stored or unsafe LPG cylinders.

Due to it’s built-in risks, the government of India has improved its monitoring and quality control measures to help improve the end product shipped in these canisters. Even though this is a good thing, the attention to quality control has unwittingly aggravated problems by decreasing the quantity of gas that can be delivered to the villagers in time.

And if the LPG cylinders are not available to the villagers on time, they have no alternative other than trekking to the forest for firewood.

Many possible solutions have been proposed. One of the more popular ones is to limit the amount of gas that a household can receive in a certain period of time.

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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