Gender inequalities and household fuel choice in India

Pallavi Choudhuri,Sonalde Desai

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121487

Abstract

The use of solid cooking fuels—wood, straw, crop residue, and cow-dung cakes—is associated with higher levels of environmental pollution and health burden. However, even in an era when incomes have grown and poverty has declined, the proportion of Indian households using clean cooking fuels such as kerosene or Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) has increased only slightly. Even among the wealthiest quintile, only about 40 percent of the households rely solely on clean fuel. Since the chores of cooking and collection of fuel remain primarily the domain of women, we argue that intra-household gender inequalities play an important role in shaping the household decision to invest in clean fuel. Analyses using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), a panel survey of over 41,000 households conducted in two waves in 2004-05 and 2011–12, respectively, show that women’s access to salaried work and control over household expenditure decisions is associated with the use of clean fuel.

Highlights

The use of solid cooking fuel is associated with higher levels of environmental pollution and health burden (Balakrishnan et al 2011, Chafe Zoë et al 2014, Lacey et al 2017)
In this paper, we have shown that households in which women have greater empowerment in the arena of market participation and control over expenditure decisions appear to be more likely to invest in the usage of clean cooking fuels
These results seem to be robust to controls for potential endogeneity. These markers seem to have a greater impact on fuel use than items such as the purchase of television sets and coolers that are of interest to all household members. These results point to the importance of incorporating gender into our considerations as we think about ways of encouraging households to move away from the use of solid fuels to that of clean fuels

Summary

Introduction

The use of solid cooking fuel is associated with higher levels of environmental pollution and health burden (Balakrishnan et al 2011, Chafe Zoë et al 2014, Lacey et al 2017). While increasing incomes can be expected to reduce the reliance on wood, straw, and cow dung cakes for cooking, and increase the use of cleaner fuels, our calculations based on the IHDS show that the proportion of households using solid fuel, for either cooking or for both cooking and other uses such as heating, barely declined from 76 percent to 73 percent between 2004-05 and 2011-12 Contrasting this mild decrease in solid fuel usage with striking decreases in poverty from 38 percent to 21 percent (Thorat et al 2017) over the same period suggests that rising incomes may not be sufficient to reduce the reliance on solid fuels. The rest of the paper structure is as follows: Section II describes patterns of fuel use in India; Section III discusses the theoretical framework on the need for approaching clean fuel adoption through the gender lens, followed by the hypotheses to be tested; Section IV provides details regarding data, variable definitions, and the methodology; Section V discusses the results; Section VI concludes, with the implications drawn on the basis of our findings

Fuel Use in India

Family

Mobility

Women’s Ability to Travel Alone to Any of the Designated Places

Findings

Conclusion and Implication