Biomass plays an important role in the day-to-day lives of inhabitants of mountain eco-systems. Trees, agricultural crops, shrubs and herbs - all interact in an intricate manner and complement each other in the mountain farming systems. In this background, the present research intends to study the fuelwood requirement by two different household groups (cattle raisers and non-cattle raisers) and distance travelled by them to collect fuelwood in an eastern Himalayan village in the state of Mizoram, India. An inventory of fuelwood was prepared, and their physico-chemical properties were determined. Four fuelwood value Indexes (FVIs) were used to classify the identified fuelwood species on the basis of their physico-chemical properties. Additionally, all the species were also classified on the basis of overall rank some index (ORSI) and people's ranking. ORSI takes into account additional parameters like fuelwood production and their availability in addition to their physico-chemical properties while People's ranking was purely based on people's perception about the useful characteristics of fuelwood. By comparing all the tree species on the basis of the six rankings, it was found that none of the FVIs could match the peoples ranking. On the other hand, ORSI could match the People's ranking to a large extent. This signifies that people's choices for fuelwood are based on a number of properties not necessarily restricted to their physico-chemical ones but also dependent on many other issues linked to their use. The investigation suggests that any future programme to identify preferable fuelwood tree species for large-scale plantation should therefore invariably include people's choices also.