Cooking fuels share the largest part of primary energy consumption in the
rural areas of Bangladesh. Understanding the demand situation of the cooking
fuels facilitates the rural energy planning in Bangladesh. This study investigates
the demand of biomass fuels for cooking through rural household and market
survey in the rural areas. It adopted a cluster sampling technique to select 60
households from four villages of two unions under Palash Upazila of Narsingdi
district. The major cooking fuels consumed by the households were firewood,
branches, leaves-and-twigs, bamboo, rice straw, rice husk and jute stick. Price
elasticity of demand of firewood was 0.317 revealing that fire wood was an
inelastic market commodity in that area. It is expected that this study will be
helpful for rural energy development in Bangladesh.