Many of us don’t realize it but the methods adopted by the global poor to cook their daily meals is one of the more serious public health and environmental problems in this world. The poor population are in dire need for better, efficient and less polluting energy sources. Some ground realities to consider,
More than half of the world’s population—three billion people—cook their food indoors using open fires or traditional cook stoves.
Indoor burning of solid fuels releases toxic pollutants including particulate matter and carbon monoxide, which cause up to 4.3 million premature deaths annually and is a major contributor to global warming.
Women and children are almost always severely affected since they not only have to carry most of the firewood but do majority of the cooking in most households.
(Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & WHO)
By improving and providing access to clean cookstoves it ensures benefits for human health, deforestation, climate change mitigation and women empowerment. In order to bank on this massive potential of clean and improved cookstoves for sustainable development, various governmental, non-governmental initiatives and critical behavioral change, is the need of the moment.
Keeping this in mind, through various large scale CSR initiatives, we got the households of Jogawadi (a small village in Bhor Taluka of Pune) to use these innovative modern cookstoves. These cookstoves consume 60% less fuel, reduce cooking time by 50%, emit 80% less smoke and reduces health risk by 50%. Today almost 90% of these households use these modern cookstoves.
Now in our aim to scale up these clean cooking solutions, more corporates and organizations should encourage, educate and help villages across India to adopt these clean cookstoves, through their CSR initiatives.