This is because wealthier households have higher throughput by definition, with higher subsistence and cash income measured in absolute terms. It is reasonable to expect that a wealthier household will require more cooking fuel, more fodder, and other inputs to household production and reproduction. Likewise, wealthier households may have the capacity and opportunity to harvest and market more forest products than poorer households. The HF villages that specialize in fuelwood trade contribute to the higher means. Also, in Jharkhand there is an active but illegal home brewing tradition. We observed numerous small stills that require substantial quantities of fuelwood. This may account for some of the unexpectedly high domestic household fuelwood consumption in some households.
There is also a problem of the direction of causality in any discussion of income sources and wealth categories. A low (or high) estimate of fuelwood use (for example) by a respondent could change that household’s overall income estimate enough to move it down (or up) a class.
Poorer households have lower income in all income categories, particularly the cash component of income, and from trade and salary. The subsistence component of income, which is made up primarily of agriculture and forest products, is higher for the poorest (see Figure 3) than for other categories of income, presumably because forest products are free goods available to everyone. High relative forest income among the poorest should primarily be interpreted to reflect limited opportunities in other sectors. It is likely that the same logic applies in other cases where this phenomenon has been observed, as noted also by Córdova, Wunder, Smith-Hall, and Börner (2013).
(d). Caste
Sixty-six percent of the households were from Scheduled Tribes, just under 17% each were Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Castes, with the remainder being from the general/unreserved population (Table 4). There were significant differences in mean total income by caste. The main income categories that contributed to these differences were agriculture, livestock, trade and salary, and agroforest (Table 5). In low access (HFLA) villages, ST and SC households tend to have higher incomes than OBC households, while the reverse is true in high access (HFHA, LFHA) villages. However, contrary to expectations, forest income was not significantly different across castes in any zone. This is consistent with the finding (below) that village plays a large role in determining income strategies; ethnicity seems to be less important than market and resource opportunities in determining livelihood choice.