A treeless plain has a fuel problem. Punjab's traditional cooking fuel was dung cakes, pathian, made by hand and dried on walls and in stacks, together with crop residue, cotton stalks and whatever wood could be got.
Making dung cakes was women's work and the stacks, built into domed structures with a mud plaster over them, are a form of vernacular construction in their own right.
Burning dung indoors is the principal source of household air pollution and of the respiratory disease that goes with it, and it fell overwhelmingly on the women doing the cooking.
The shared oven, the sanjha chulha, existed because fuel was scarce.
Bottled gas and then piped connections have displaced dung in most Punjabi households, which is one of the largest improvements in rural health in the state's history and is never described as one.
Dung that was burned was not returned to the fields, which is part of why Punjab's soil organic carbon was low even before the Green Revolution.
A buffalo produces something like ten kilograms of dung a day, so a house with two or three animals had enough to cook with and to plaster the floor and the walls with, which was the other use. Nothing about the animal was wasted and the fuel arrived whether it was wanted that day or not.
The chulha was built of mud, rebuilt every year, and shaped for the pot and for what was burned in it. A mud stove taking dung cakes and a gas ring are different tools, and the cooking changed with the switch in ways nobody wrote down. The pot left on overnight went first.
The plain that stopped burning dung indoors now burns straw outdoors on a scale visible from orbit. The fuel problem did not go away. It moved out of the kitchen and into the field, and it stopped being women who breathed it.