Indian Government prepares Action Plan for Improved Cookstoves Deployment

The Government of India is preparing an action plan for development and deployment of cook stoves in the country, the Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy, Dr. Farooq Abdullah has said in a written reply in Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliament, on Friday, April 16, according to a Government of India Press Information Bureau Release.

The statement says that in order to make smokeless stoves popular the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy launched a National Biomass Cook-stove Initiative during 2009. The primary aim of the initiative is to develop and enhance the availability of better and efficient family and community size Biomass Cook-stoves for household and industrial applications in the country.

It also emphasizes on enhancement of technical capacity in the country by setting up testing, certification and monitoring facilities and strengthening R&D programmes in technical institutions of the country.

In this regard, the Ministry has constituted a Core Group and sanctioned a project to assess present status of various types of improved Biomass Cook-stoves currently available, their suitability and delivery mechanisms and to prepare an action plan for development and deployment of cook-stoves.

Simultaneously, the Ministry has identified four test centers for carrying out performance testing.

COPD and Indoor Air Pollution

Katelyn Harding writing in the COPD Foundation blog takes note of the Indoor Air Pollution Campaigns and the question of impact on COPD:

"Here’s something I learned while working on the latest issue of the Digest: Every year 2 million people in developing countries die from Indoor Air Pollution [IAP]. Of those 2 million deaths, 54 percent are from COPD.

Imagine that. These people, who cook their food using biomass fuels—wood, charcoal, crop residues, animal dung, coal—are using primitive and inefficient stoves, which results in IAP, or fumes, smoke and contaminants created from the indoor cook stoves.

According to a 2009 study from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Programme, 3 billion people—or almost half of humanity—rely on traditional biomass as the available modern energy services fail to meet their needs.

So what can be done to combat this massive problem that affects 600-800 million households worldwide?

Simon Bishop, head of Policy and Communications at the Shell Foundation, says the most effective solution is Improved Cook Stoves [ICS].

The Shell Foundation, the corporate foundation of the energy company and Envirofit International, a US non-profit, began a partnership in 2007 designed to create a global ICS business distributing millions of ICS to developing countries in an effort to reduce IAP. Their goal is to see 10 million stoves sold in 5 countries over the next 5 years.

So far, Envirofit have sold more than 100,000 ICS in southern India.

Simon says it’s hard to predict if ICS will lead to a reduction in health impacts, including COPD.

“If you’ve got indoor air pollution, and you put an improved cook stove in a home, it will reduce pollution by anything between 40 and 90 percent. But is that enough to reduce COPD cases by 40-90 percent as well? At this stage there is not enough medical evidence to prove this link. We urgently need to plug this gap in medical research.”

It will take time to prove the impact of putting an ICS in someone’s home and the incidence it has on COPD, but for now, I think it’s a pretty great start, don’t you?

Shimoga's Village Health Workers Campaign on Indoor Air Pollution

In a pathbreaking initiative, Shell Foundation today joined hands with village level health workers, the Anganwadi workers, in the Shikaripur Taluk of Shimoga district to spread awareness on the dangers of smoke in the kitchen and propagate the adoption of improved cook stoves. The Anganwadi system is managed by Anganwadi workers from the community who are trained in health, nutrition and child-care. She is in-charge of an Anganwadi, which covers a population of 1000. A group of Anganwadis is supervised and guided by a Child Development Projects Officer (CDPO). There are about 300 such workers in the Shikaripur Taluk who report to the Taluk Health Officer and CDPO.

Over the past two days, nearly 100 anganwadi workers have been trained to take the IAP campaign to over a 100 villages of Shikaripur Taluk, effectively covering 100,000 people over the next one month. Each Anganwadi worker has a coverage of around one thousand people.

Says Simon Bishop, Head of Policy and Communications, Shell Foundation, "More than 400,000 people in India die each year from toxic fumes inhaled while cooking on open fires - yet most affected households don't even realise the smoke is bad for them. Furthermore, few people realise so-called 'Improved Cook stoves' can dramatically
reduce fumes. They also use at least 40% less wood, which means people can either save money on fuel or save time collecting it. We are delighted to be partnering with the District Administration - and its Anganwadi workers - to raise awareness about smoke and how it can best be tackled."

The launch of the campaign brings together efforts that have included support from the Karnataka Chief Minister's Office, various ministries of the state government, the district authorities, the Zilla Parishad and the Community health officers. Probably for the first time ever, we have had the Anganwadi system, the Community Health Officers, the DC’s office, the Zilla Parishad, the State Ministries,

The campaign conceived and initiated by the Shell Foundation is being run with support from stove manufacturers Envirofit and SELCO who are training and providing stoves for demonstrations.

This route to market is expected to provide yet another avenue for category education as well as outreach for adoption of stoves.


Based on the results of the current phase, the campaign can be extended to all the 2000 anganwadi workers in Shimoga district. The first batch of 100 anganwadi workers were picked by the CDPO in the taluk to launch the exercise.

Workers were trained in batches of 50 on the health issues of indoor air pollution and the formats of communicating the issue to village people.

Thereafter, they were also trained in stove demonstrations. The angawadi workers would now take the campaign on their own to their villages and provide the campaign grassroot outreach.

This is part of the Shell Foundation's wider 'Room to Breathe' campaign, which aims to save lives, improve livelihoods and reduce climate change emissions by tackling kitchen smoke.

Cookstoves: The Secret Weapon Against Poverty and Climate Change

Stoking up a cookstove revolution is the way to beat poverty and climate change, says Asden Awards which has over the past decade rewarded and championed some of the world's leading stove programmes.

Excerpts from the Ashden Report: "Our calculations suggest that a global programme to manufacture the half-billion improved stoves needed to convert the world’s poor to safer cooking could save hundreds of thousands of young lives a year - and at the same time cut global greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of up to one billion tonnes of CO2 a year.

Such investments ought to attract large sums through the carbon market. We calculate that improved cooking stoves can keep a tonne of CO2 out of the atmosphere for as little as $1-3 – an exceedingly good deal in a market where offsets can be sold for $20-30 a tonne.

Ashden Award winner Aprovecho, is collaborating with China’s largest manufacturer of domestic stoves, Shengzhou Stove Manufacturer (SSM), to mass produce lightweight portable ceramic stoves, based on the rocket design. The company has already sold more than 110,000 stoves mainly through distributors in countries like India, South Africa and Chile.

The stoves last around three years and cost as little as $8 each. They cut fuel use by 40 per cent or more and reduce smoke and carbon monoxide emissions by more than 50 per cent. The stoves will typically cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than one tonne a year, or as much as two tonnes if the fuel comes from deforestation. This will result in reductions in emissions at a cost of only around $2 per tonne of CO2.

Despite their growing popularity, the acceptance of improved stoves can be a problem. One study in Mexico of early Patsari stoves found that 50% of women abandoned them in favour of their old, more dangerous stoves. GIRA worked closely with users to improve the design, and 70% of families now use their Patsari stove on a regular basis. This highlights the importance of looking at both the technology and building a relationship with the users.
Although many women dislike the smoke, for some it has a value. For instance, keeping away malaria-carrying mosquitoes and killing bugs that lurk in their thatched roofs.

A study, in Bangladesh, found that women said they knew about the health benefits of new stoves, but were cautious about adopting them ahead of family, friends of community leaders. Many said they feared the new stoves might change their husbands’ views about their cooking.
“People tend to reject a technology that an opinion leader has rejected,” says Grant Miller of Stanford Medical School, who organised the study. In future, far greater effort needs to go into both cook-friendly design of stoves and in ‘social marketing’ to educate women about the benefits of new stoves, he says.

Getting the technology and design of stoves right is essential to ensure their widespread adoption. They need to be culturally appropriate. But equally governments, businesses and development organisations need to promote and replicate the most effective stoves or the necessary scale of uptake will never be achieved. Carbon finance may be significant in achieving this.

Working closely with communities to overcome the barriers to adoption is essential to squaring this circle. The good news is that the costs are not great, the mechanics of scaling up production are not complex – and the benefits are multiple, including better health, improved rates of child survival, better lives for women, improved local environments and cost-effective measures to tackle climate change.

“There is now a compelling case for getting improved stoves to millions more people,” says Sarah Butler Sloss, Founder Director of the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy. “Better stoves improve health, save lives, help mitigate the effects of climate change while also saving money.”

Read the full report here.

Is Kitchen Smoke Killing the Monsoons?

There seem to be many a scientific proponent of the premise that the increasingly erratic monsoons in the subcontinent have a correlation with Black Carbon (soot) from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Oceanographer, writer, Danielle Meitiv captures the scientific work done so far in her blog.

Says Danielle, pollutants, particularly black carbon (BC), are affecting the monsoons by a process that starts in the winter when soot combines with dust blown from the west, creating huge clouds of haze that hug the southern slopes of the Himalayas.

Danielle explains, "The BC in these clouds absorb solar radiation, warming the air even faster than usual. This draws more moisture to the region sooner, causing the early monsoon to intensify. This theory is known as the Elevated Heat Pump, as the soot acts to pump heat up the Himalayan slopes. Observations show a widespread and sustained warming in the pre-monsoon season over the last three decades. In that same time period, early monsoon rainfall has increased by 20% ."

"Over the oceans, BC has a different, although equally damaging effect. BC combines with other anthropogenic aerosols, forming Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABCs), large plumes of particles that can stretch over whole continents or ocean basins. These ABCs absorb solar radiation in the atmosphere, causing dimming below. This reduction of irradiance reduces evaporation and cools the surface, leading to a weakening of the later monsoon."

"The combined impact of these two phenomena, the Elevated Heat Pump and Solar Dimming, increases flooding during the early months of monsoon, and causes drought later on. Some studies suggest that over time the result will be an overall weakening of the monsoon and a reduction of rainfall over the region. Reduction in rainfall of great concern because in South Asia there is a strong positive correlation between the amount of precipitation and food production. The Indian summer monsoon is the biggest source of freshwater to the region: over 70% of the annual precipitation over India occurs during the summer monsoon."

Humble Cookstoves Reduce Deadly Toll

For as little as three dollars, stoves can save lives, mitigate climate change and reduce deforestation in developing countries.

Nearly half the world’s households, around three billion people worldwide, eat food cooked on traditional stoves and fires that kill around 1.6 million people a year-most of them children. A new report says that a global programme to produce half a billion improved stoves could convert the world’s poor to safer cooking, save hundreds of thousands of young lives a year, and at the same time cut global greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of up to one billion tonnes of CO2 a year.

The report, ‘Stoking up a cookstove revolution: the secret weapon against poverty and climate change’ published by the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, gives many examples of stoves programmes across the developing world that provide affordable, robust ‘improved’ stoves that burn less fuel, cook faster and approximately halve harmful smoke emissions.

Many use a chimney to remove smoke and gases from the kitchen, improving combustion. “Efficient stoves are the most direct and affordable way to address climate change, but we need millions and millions of them,” says Dean Still, director of Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon, USA. There are still hurdles to overcome, says the report. Each improved stove must be designed for local cooking practices and diets and studies show that cultural patterns sometimes prevent their easy acceptance and adoption.

According to the Ashden Awards it is essential to use social marketing and education to introduce the stoves sensitively and ensure they are designed according to local cooks’ needs and preferences. Many clean stoves are designed by social entrepreneurs for local manufacture, and non governmental organisations usually provide training to ensure they meet quality standards. Grameen Shakti in Bangladesh, for example, trains local technicians who build stoves in people’s homes, aiming to provide 10 million stoves in this way by 2015.

Substantial investment and support is needed to reach the half billion people who need efficient stoves. The report suggests that the carbon market can play a useful role in stove programme investment: “We calculate that improved cooking stoves can keep a tonne of CO2 out of the atmosphere for as little as $1 to $3 – an exceedingly good deal in a market where offsets can be sold for $20 to 30 a tonne,” says Fred Pearce, author of the report.

“We think the time has come for greater finance and political will to roll out stoves. Just as donors have grasped the value of rolling out bed-nets against malaria, we want to see improved stoves make a real impact on the poor. Better stoves improve health, save lives, help mitigate the effects of climate change while also saving money,” says Sarah Butler-Sloss founder director of the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy.

E+Co to Market Improved Cook Stoves in Tanzania

E+Co, a non governmental organisation based in Tanzania announced plans to introduce new cooking stoves in Tanzania in a mission to reduce indoor air pollution and greenhouse gases.

At a stakeholders meeting in Dar es Salaam held by the NGO, manager Erick Wurster said the project is meant to curb deforestation and improve air quality by manufacturing or importing charcoal and wood fuel efficient biomass stoves.

Mr Wurster explained that according to World Health Organisation (WHO), it is estimated that 27,000 deaths occur every year in Tanzania from firewood and charcoal stoves and destroying an average of 121,000 hectares of forests.

He said that air pollution from cooking with solid fuel on primitive stoves was a key risk factor in childhood acute respiratory infections such as pneumonia as well as many other respiratory, cardiovascular and ocular diseases.

He said the problem is set to amplify given that more than 95 per cent of Tanzania's population relies on dangerous and inefficient cooking fuel.

Mr Wurster said that the new technology will include `Envirofit stoves' and `Quality Jiko' to be imported from China. Later, he said, Tanzanians would be trained on how to manufacture the stoves locally. He said after introduction of the stoves, the project will extend to water filtration systems, replacing the need to boil water using firewood.

For the full story and source: The Citizen

Black Carbon Should Be A Prime Policy Target

Black carbon soot, produced from incomplete combustion of diesel fuel and biomass, is one of the largest contributors to climate change apart from CO2 and should be a prime target of policymakers according to scientists and experts testifying at a hearing of the US House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming chaired by Congressman Edward Markey.

“Black carbon packs a powerful punch when it comes to climate change, absorbing solar radiation while in the atmosphere and also darkening the surfaces of snow and ice, contributing to increased melting in vulnerable regions such as the Arctic and Himalayas,” said Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD).

“The good news is that it only stays in the atmosphere for up to a few weeks, making it an ideal target for achieving fast cooling through aggressive mitigation measures.” Reducing black carbon emissions and other short-term climate forcers such as HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone can serve as a complement to CO2 reduction measures, which can take up to 1,000 years to produce significant cooling because of CO2’s long atmospheric lifetime.

“A drastic reduction in BC has the potential of offsetting CO2-induced warming for a decade or two. Effectively, BC reduction may provide a possible mechanism for buying time to develop and implement effective steps for reducing CO2 emissions,” said Dr V. Ramanathan from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in his written testimony. Because developed countries have been successful in reducing black carbon emissions in recent years, the technology exists to help developing countries, such as China and India, significantly cut their soot emissions, through diesel-particulate filters for vehicles and cleaner-burning cookstoves.

Dr Ramanathan has spearheaded the Project Surya programme to bring solar cookstoves to India to assist in gathering additional data on the climate forcing potential of black carbon and its impact on local health – emissions of black carbon contribute to respiratory illness, the fourth leading cause of excess mortality in developing countries.

“Policymakers are beginning to take note of black carbon and other short-term climate forcers like HFCs, methane, and tropospheric ozone, where emissions reductions are cost-effective and can yield major climate and health benefits,” added Zaelke. “These 'fast-action' strategies are low-hanging fruits that need to be picked now to avoid the dangerous near-term consequences of abrupt climate change.”

The Challenge of an Energy Policy Framework

As part of an effort to make available clean improved cookstoves to people who rely on traditional cookstoves and fuels which lead to Indoor Air Pollution, First Energy has been focused on delivering Oorja cookstoves to rural & tribal India. First Energy is an alternative energy startup that spun out of BP. In an interview with Think Change India, Mahesh Yagnaraman, founder of First Energy speaks more about their operations. Here are the excerpts.

What do you think is lacking in the sector of your organization’s interest in spite of your intervention? The policy framework for energy is very lop sided. Subsidies are making fuel unaffordable for the Government and the country. At the same time, the alternative energy subsidies have not led to any adoption of scalable, sustainable alternative energy development. In the case of the specific business of FE, the company faces twin challenges – cooking gas, LPG, is subsidised to the extent of Rs 290 per bottle and the wrong incentives for biomass power generation has driven up the prices of agri-waste artificially.

Who are the founders and management? What do they do? The founders are myself, Mukund Deogaonkar, Sreeram Thiagrajan and Raymond Moses. I have been the Managing Director of FE since 2006, Mukund is the Operations Director. Sreeram & Raymond are executive directors on the board and actively support the team through their guidance and coaching.

At the Alchemists Ark, Sreeram and Raymond consult for and add value in sales, marketing, supply chain to several MNCs and large corporates in India and abroad. Raymond is alumnus of IIT Kanpur while Sreeram is an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad.

I have been at the helm of the business in India since its start in Feb 2006 bringing together an initial team of talented people, and setting up the company. I did my MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and have a career spanning 19 years in different countries/continents and across strategy, sales, marketing, supply chain and IT implementation at Unilever, Castrol and BP.

Mukund Deogaonkar has been associated with the business from the start and has been the part of the team that was responsible for creating business concept and heads the operations. He has sales and marketing experience for over 17 years in fuels and lubricant industries and has strong proven ability to forge partnerships and relationships across the value chain.

How is it funded? The venture is self-funded at this point by the founders.

How do you measure your effectiveness? We use the two straightforward metrics of profitably and stoves sold.

Assuming this problem exists in similar forms throughout the world, what unique challenges do you face in fighting it here in India?
India’s energy framework is still very closed and not liberalised. The heavy subsidies make the entire thing very inefficient.

How do you intend to scale this model going forward? What are the future goals/plans for the venture? We aim to be profitable this year, at least at the per unit level. In the next 3 – 5 years we want to reach 1 million households. Beyond that, however, like 10 years out we have not thought that far.

What criteria do you use to identify partners/beneficiaries? We look at their ability to provide channel or route to market, share the same values and commitment in serving underserved markets, willingness to exercise patient capital, and have the ability to influence or shape policy.

Creating An Aspiration for Stoves

As India's improved cook stoves program gains traction as a result of the efforts of government, stove manufacturers, global foundations and NGOs, the issue is getting focussed on a few basic challenges : Selling the Idea, Finding the Funds, Providing the Support, says a report "Better Burning, Better Breathing: Improving Health with Cleaner Cook Stoves" by Tina Adler in Environmental Health Perspectives.

This echoes the Three As that Shell Foundation is seeking to address through its Room to Breath Campaign, namely Awareness, Availability and Affordability .

According to Adler's report, the main objective of Indian consumers who purchase an improved cook stove is often quite different from the Indian government’s reason for promoting stoves. The government wants to improve the health of rural Indians. “But people buy [stoves] more for aspirational reasons,” says Mahesh Yagnaraman, CEO and managing director of First Energy. The energy-efficient stoves burn less, or burn different fuels, so women and children spend less time gathering solid fuel. As part of its original sales campaign, First Energy had doctors test the breathing capacity of interested customers to demonstrate how the old stoves had harmed their lungs. But instead of wanting a new stove, the prospective customers “just wanted medicine,” Yagnaraman says.

To sell stoves, you have to explain how the stoves save time and fuel and don’t dirty the kitchen with soot, says Anchan. Selling improved stoves is “very difficult,” he says. Consumers know the smoke irritates their eyes and makes them cough, but they don’t always comprehend the long-term impact of breathing high levels of smoke.

Customers “don’t trust any of these [stove] solutions very easily,” says Yagnaraman. No stove is entirely reliable, so some families will keep more than one type of stove in their homes, he says. Usage studies show that families cook at most about 70% of their meals on their improved cook stove, says Smith. In their studies, he and his colleagues attach microchip usage monitors to stoves instead of relying on self-reports from the family members. “If you ask people, they say, ‘Oh yes, we love it, we use it all the time,’” Smith says.

Significant customer support is key to any cook stove program’s success, experts say. “You can’t drop a stove into a household and walk away,” notes Rita Colwell, a public health expert at the University of Maryland at College Park and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Envirofit provides that hands-on care, Anchan says. In addition to training customers how to use the stove and providing them with a manual, Envirofit calls customers to see how the stove is working for them.

Equally compelling is the issue of working up an industry where the cook stoves actually make a significant difference. Notes Adler, data from studies such as RESPIRE will help answer an important question facing clean-stove advocates and public health experts: how much must concentrations of smoke in homes be reduced in order to improve families’ health? When tested in the field, few of the improved cook stoves used in India achieve more than a 50–60% reduction in indoor air pollution levels and a 50% reduction in fuel use, says Simon Bishop, policy and communications manager at the Shell Foundation, which promotes improved cook stoves as a primary solution to indoor air pollution.

The full feature, Better Burning, Better Breathing: Improving Health with Cleaner Cook Stoves