So what’s the big bet on Black Carbon given that it is indeed an immediate challenge for India. One of the points that probably get overlooked in the many informed discussions is that the impact of black carbon is in the proximity of emission and, therefore, of a localized nature. So, for India, it is not merely a question of how much it needs to be a per capita contributor to carbon footprints but, simply, what is it that is getting done in the eco sphere around the Himalayas that is impacting it?
Better stoves with lower emissions is clearly the way to go but the real benefit is from the other equally less visible, from a causative point of view is the health issue. As Penn Univ researcher Jeremy Carl had pointed out in his piece ‘Rising From the Ashes: India’s Black Carbon Opportunity’
“But India’s greatest black carbon reduction opportunity remains in cookstoves. Indeed it is the problem of indoor and local air pollution from cookstoves that has caused the Indian government and many private groups to initiate numerous campaigns over several decades to bring improved cookstoves to rural India. But generally speaking, these attempts have been unsuccessful for a variety of reasons.
First, cookstoves may break and villagers may lack the money, spare parts, or expertise to repair them.
Second, traditional cookstoves give a particular flavor to foods and many Indian women are
reluctant to trade these in even for more theoretically efficient stoves.
Third, with the exception of the work done by the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy, cookstove programs have almost always been done at a moderate scale. To achieve mass scale necessary for meaningful black carbon reduction (or large scale local health improvement), tens of millions of cookstoves will need to be put into the field and utilized. That takes scale, resources, and reach that can only be done with the active participation of the Indian state at the highest levels, ideally through a public-private partnership.
