This policy brief reviews the existing policies pertaining to clean cooking energy, analyses a broad range of demand- and supply-side challenges that hinder the penetration and sustained use of clean cooking energy solutions, and proposes an interdisciplinary and multidimensional national approach for addressing these issues.

According to data from GARV2, 37 per cent of households in Odisha are unelectrified, even as over 98 per cent of villages in the state have been electrified.

This briefing paper reports on the largest energy access survey ever conducted in India, covering a representative sample of the rural poor across six states with interviews in 8,566 households.

This study forms part of a broader project, supported by the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA), with the primary objective to analyse the current situation and development of the international carbon markets.

Free distribution of a technology can be an effective development policy instrument if its adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Improved cookstoves may be such a case: they generate high environmental and public health returns, but adoption is generally low.

The approach of the study contains the brief literature review on the industrial consumption and production of charcoal in India. Based on this and the pre-set objectives, the study problems were formulated.

The paper discusses challenges in analyzing the costs of household cooking methods (fuels and associated stove technologies) in lower-income countries, and sources of divergence between observed and true social costs.