Abstract
Improved cook stoves (ICS) have been widely touted for their potential to deliver the triple benefits of improved household health and time savings, reduced deforestation and local environmental degradation, and reduced emissions of black carbon, a significant short-term contributor to global climate change. Yet diffusion of ICS technologies among potential users in many low-income settings, including India, remains slow, despite decades of promotion. This paper explores the variation in perceptions of and preferences for ICS in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, as revealed through a series of semi-structured focus groups and interviews from 11 rural villages or hamlets. We find cautious interest in new ICS technologies, and observe that preferences for ICS are positively related to perceptions of health and time savings. Other respondent and community characteristics, e.g., gender, education, prior experience with clean stoves and institutions promoting similar technologies, and social norms as perceived through the actions of neighbours, also appear important. Though they cannot be considered representative, our results suggest that efforts to increase adoption and use of ICS in rural India will likely require a combination of supply-chain improvements and carefully designed social marketing and promotion campaigns, and possibly incentives, to reduce the up-front cost of stoves.
Highlights
Over two thirds of all households in India cook on traditional stoves using solid bio-fuels such as wood, agricultural waste, coal and dried cattle manure [1,2]
We focus in particular on two sets of issues: (1) the heterogeneity in user perceptions of the health and environmental effects of traditional stoves, and in their preferences for Improved cook stoves (ICS) technologies; and (2) how the perceptions and preferences relate to social stratification, prior experiences, and the influence of neighbors and community leaders
Communities selected for focus groups were chosen to represent locations both with (n = 6) and without (n = 5) prior experience and knowledge of clean energy projects promoted by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) of India
Summary
Over two thirds of all households in India (about 170 million households, or nearly 800 million people) cook on traditional stoves using solid bio-fuels such as wood, agricultural waste, coal and dried cattle manure [1,2]. This practice can adversely impact respiratory health of individuals and local forests and other environmental resources, as well as contribute to climate change [3,4,5,6,7,8]. The largest program implemented by the Indian government, the National Programme on Improved Chulhas (NPIC), which disseminated some 30 million stoves, is widely regarded as a failure [9,10,11]
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