One day I was in a village called Srirangapur in the Ranga Reddy District, Telangana State. I was trying to understand the rural energy situation. I observed that there was heaps of fuelwood stored in the courtyards of many houses. This fuelwood was collected, for use in cooking and which could last for several months for the respective families. It was harvested from the village commons and the nearby-degraded scrubland. I found that, on average, people spend up to four days in a month collecting fuelwood. Considering the rural wage rates being currently offered under government programs, it amounts to no less than Ten US Dollars a month. Where most of the rural poor earn around only one or two US Dollars per day. Their spending on fuelwood sometimes works out costlier than the Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) supplied by the government through a range of subsidies.

To understand the biomass stoves being used, randomly I visited about 50 household kitchens. I noticed that about half of the stoves were of ‘three-stone’ stove type and the rest were made from clay. Such stoves were highly inefficient, rudimentary and primitive. I will never forget those visits; they made me realise how a large number of people are still stuck with the inefficient and highly polluting stoves.

The stoves and the kitchens do not reflect the changes in the lives of the families over the generations. Many people are now living in concrete houses, eating high-value food, can afford mobile phones, and send their children to English-medium private schools, but they don’t have a good and efficient stove. Despite all the winds of change and development, the kitchen remains a smoky place with dark-soot walls and the roof. Even traditionally, kitchens have occupied relatively small spaces inside or outside the house.

I got sensitised and myself declared that my first step would be creating awareness about indoor air pollution and its harmful effects. I went to communities and showed them pictures of their stoves using an LCD projector. Although people-in-general were interested in watching the slideshow, some women objected when it came to seeing their own stoves. This is because the kitchen was not a place of pride for them, even though they respect the stove very much. I then explained to the communities the impact of indoor air pollution and its multiplier effects on them. They were quite interested in adopting efficient stoves, but they were helpless, as they did not have access to good stoves.

In the villages, the state government promoted chimney stoves with grates this was about 15 years back. Those stoves were nowhere to be found. Within a few years, the stoves had disintegrated, the chimneys were choked with soot, the grates were burnt down, and the stoves disappeared. The design of the stoves did not take into account how adaptable they were to local conditions and practices. The stoves were routinely distributed under a government scheme and were also highly subsidised. They were not accepted by the communities for various reasons, and therefore the sustainable demand from the local communities did not exist.

This exposure made me sensitive towards the issues associated with the stoves being used in rural areas. I was motivated to help and improve their stoves’ design. I realised that there could not be a single globally accepted good stove design to meet the local needs. As the challenge was adapting designs to meet the local needs.

As I started off, I could not easily access specialists in the field of good stoves. However, using the internet, I found numerous, and diverse stove designs that evolved around the globe – in response to a variety of food habits, cooking methods, cultural traditions, types of available biomass for fuel, family size, etc. Studying them formed the basis of my initial understanding of stoves, and I continued the research and designed the stoves to meet the specific community needs. In a span of 5 years, I designed more than 50 biomass stoves, which were low-cost efficient and adoptable by the communities as per their requirement for diverse geographies and food habits of the people. I continued my work and facilitated the stoves in parts of India and abroad. My stoves designs were very much useful to the recent mass exodus of people, especially from the disturbed countries to the European countries and especially to Germany.

All the information on stove designs was written as a book titled ‘Understanding Stoves,’ MetaMeta, Netherlands published it. All my work on stoves was declared as open knowledge or creative commons for the common good.

A stove is not just a stove or a piece of equipment, it has so many values around, which are addressed by its use. They reduce the drudgery of women in cooking and in accessing the fuelwood. The health of women and children is improved through less-emissions. Time is saved for women to spend on other aspects required to improve quality of life. The local biomass and biodiversity are conserved. They mitigate smog and CO2 emissions which is a cause of global warming and climate change. There are so many values around this simple initiative, and I feel very fortunate and happy, for working on this aspect and popularized it globally.

A woman cooking on three stone stove, suffering from smoke