Why government’s plan to bet big on induction cooking is likely to go up in smoke

Most women have revealed they take part in some cooking on a daily basis.

In what is being seen as a major push for India’s energy security efforts, the Government of India is working on an ambitious plan to provide induction cook stoves to poor households in rural and urban India.

By leveraging electricity to power India’s cooking needs, the government wants to solve three problems with one move: one, of weaning the country off LPG cylinders’ use; two, boosting India’s drastically falling electricity consumption, and; three, reducing its dependence on fossil fuels.

It’s a nifty plan that looks good on paper. While its intention is no doubt noble, whether the move will likely succeed is another question.

If history is anything to go by, the chances of its success appear bleak. That’s because ever since the 1980s, successive governments have been working on implementing clean stove programmes, with limited success. In fact, in a huge campaign, through the 1980s and 1990s, the government subsidised and distributed 32 million improved stoves, but it turned out to be a failure. Renewed interest in Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) worldwide prompted another wave of interest in India, with the government launching a new-large scale programme with an improved stove design in 2011, but that plan also had little success.

There are many reasons for this.

In what is regarded as of the most extensive field studies undertaken on the subject to date, a large-scale randomised trial with a four year follow-up, led in India by Harvard economist Rema Hanna, found that common, laboratory validated stoves were a tough sell with the target audience they are designed for — poor households, especially women. The study found that households used the stoves irregularly and inappropriately, failed to maintain them, with the result that its usage declined over time.

Complicating matters was the reluctance of households to abandon cooking methods embedded in their culture, with the result that more than 80 percent of households still prefer wood, cow dung and crop residues as primary fuel, despite the availability of cleaner alternatives such as LPG.

It is no surprise then that as things stand today, electrical induction stoves hardly have any takers, despite its many benefits. For example, a primary survey done among induction stove users in Himachal Pradesh (a state that is 99 percent electrified) found that electricity replaced wood as the primary fuel in only 5 percent households, with 63 percent of households preferring to use firewood for cooking.

Getting users to adapt to new technology is a tricky proposition anywhere, but when it comes to induction cooking, its adoption remains riddled with a few additional challenges.

Affordability remains a primary one. When you use an induction stove, you use electromagnetism to heat cookware, which means that your utensils have to contain enough iron to generate a magnetic field around them. For a consumer, this not only means bearing upfront costs, as well as maintenance costs, but also the cost of switching to compatible cookware. This is something the majority of the households might not be willing to bear when their existing utensils and source of fuel are working to their convenience.

Tied to the challenge of affordability is the issue of perception. The issue is especially important, because research has shown it is this that is at the heart of the successful adoption of clean stove technology. The data clearly states that in India, the public isn’t convinced. According to a survey conducted by the Stockholm Environment Institute, majority of Indian women surveyed said they preferred cooking chapatis the traditional way in a clay oven, or over open fire, because they can both fry and bake the bread, and because it just tastes better.

Just how ingrained these behavioural patterns are can be gauged from the fact that 90 percent of Ujjwala beneficiaries still use solid fuel for cooking, with the option of having an LPG cylinder, due to the availability and affordability of solid fuel over LPG. The four-year study led by Hanna, in fact, underlined the importance of taking into account these behavioural patterns, stressing “the need to test environmental technologies in real-world settings where behaviour may undermine potential impact”.

Lastly, there is a more elemental issue to the government’s grand plan of powering India’s cooking through electricity — lack of electricity supply. While huge strides have been made in the area, power supply in most rural areas remains irregular at best. According to news reports, 10 states receive less than 20 hours of power, with nearly 30 million households that don’t receive power.

Which brings us to the question — is there a point of spending crores of rupees in distributing these stoves, if people aren’t going to use them?

Over the years, improved cook stoves have been hailed as a miracle technological innovation to handle a host of issues — climate, deforestation, health, women’s empowerment. Yet, it’s also true that more than three decades of effort of pushing these stoves among unwilling recipients has yielded sporadic success.

Until the time governments can effectively communicate the benefits of this technology to its intended recipients, taking into account local contexts, and set up requisite infrastructure to provide reliable and affordable access to it, chances are, this plan will go the same way as its predecessors: up in smoke.

Shikha Sharma is a New-Delhi-based independent journalist and photographer. Twitter: @ShikhaSharma304. Views are personal.