Viewpoint – Making the clean available: Escaping India’s Chulha Trap

Viewpoint – Making the clean available: Escaping India’s Chulha Trap. Energy Policy, October 2014

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Authors: Kirk R. Smith, Ambuj Sager

Highlights

• Pollution from cooking with solid fuels is largest health hazard for Indian women and girls.
• 700 million Indians are caught in a trap using solid fuels with little change in number exposed for decades.
• Efforts to make the biomass fuel clean through advanced stoves have made only modest progress in decades.•A major new effort is needed to make the clean available, in the form of gas and electricity.
• This will require forging new partnerships and rethinking how these fuels are currently promoted.

Solid cookfuel pollution is the largest energy-related health risk globally and most important cause of ill-health for Indian women and girls. At 700 million cooking with open biomass chulhas, the Indian population exposed has not changed in several decades, in spite of hundreds of programs to make the “available clean”, i.e. to burn biomass cleanly in advanced stoves. While such efforts continue, there is need to open up another front to attack this health hazard. Gas and electric cooking, which are clean at the household, are already the choice for one-third of Indians. Needed is a new agenda to make the “clean available”, i.e., to vigorously extend these clean fuels into populations that are caught in the Chulha Trap. This will require engaging new actors including the power and petroleum ministries as well as the ministry of health, which have not to date been directly engaged in addressing this problem. It will have implications for LPG imports, distribution networks, and electric and gas user technologies, as well as setting new priorities for electrification and biofuels, but at heart needs to be addressed as a health problem, not one of energy access, if it is to be solved effectively.