A clean cooking strategy

A clean cooking strategy

Article:

1. NITI Aayog professionals Abhinav Trivedi and Anurag Mishra discuss about sustainable cooking fuel choices

Important Analysis:

2. Factors influencing cooking fuel choice:

• availability
• household income
• price of fuel
• education and awareness,
• culture or lifestyle, government policies

3. Cooking fuel and Indoor air pollution:

• Cooking fuels emit toxic pollutants such as respirable particles, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and sulphur, benzene, formaldehyde and polyaromatic compounds
• These substances contribute to indoor air pollution. In households with limited ventilation these pollutants can lead to severe health problems.

4. Best Cooking Fuel options:

• Various cooking fuel options include firewood, pellet, biogas, kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas or LPG, piped natural gas or PNG
• Among the available cooking fuel options biogas accounts for the lowest effective greenhouse gas emission followed by PNG and LPG
• A comparison based on the cost of various fuels, annual life cycle emission per household (kg/CO2 equivalent) and extent of in-house air pollution indicates that biogas and PNG are the best cooking fuel options.

5. Importance of clean energy fuel for India:

• In India, a household spends an average of 5-6% of its total expenditure
• Affordable, reliable and clean energy is essential to reduce environmental and health impacts. Further, it is also important for women empowerment

6. Government Initiatives:

• The government had introduced the National Project on Biogas Development (NPBD) for promoting biogas as an affordable and clean cooking fuel in rural areas
• However, the programme suffered from major issues such as: corruption, poor construction material, a lack of maintenance, misrepresentation of achievements and a lack of accountability and follow-up services.
• The government launched Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojna in 2016 with the objective of providing LPG connections to more than eight crore families.
• Further, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB) has been holding auctions across cities for distribution of gas for cooking through PNG.
• LPG has been promoted and subsidised over the years and consequently its preference has been on a rise
• However, LPG import along with large subsidies is a burden on government resources which hamper the focus on other social development programmes.

7. Promotion of biogas:

• There is a need to promote biogas in rural and semi-urban areas- A service-based enterprise model with suitable resource availability should be adopted
• Such a model is being successfully implemented in Hoshiarpur, Punjab using a 100 cubic meter biogas plant. The plant supplies clean and piped cooking biogas to households and a school every day.
• Such models can also generation employment significantly at the grass-root level

8. Promotion of PNG:

• PNG should be promoted in urban areas starting from Tier-I and Tier-II/III cities
• LPG should be made just one of the options to choose from rather than giving it primacy over others
• The cost of LPG must be set as the upper-cost ceiling
• PNGRB should focus only on the setting up of safety regulations, with distribution rights being given to distributors.

9. Way Forward:

• Consumption-based subsidies need to be replaced with a functional subsidy that is provided on the basis of household income levels and local variables.
• Issue of leakages should be addressed
• Citizens should be made aware of the cooking fuel options
• The energy choices should be based on the nature of the fuel and not because of socio-economic constraints.