Despite the challenges, the importance of monitoring and evaluation remains critical in verifying the benefits of improved stove designs and their use. Over the last eight years the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI), has been engaged in the Monitoring and Evaluation of improved cook stove programmes in various rural and urban settings.

The conventional grid-based electricity has not been able to reach many remote rural areas and small settlements.

The dismal situation and poor quality of life in rural India is because of unavailability of energy. It is shown that sophisticated technology can help solve this and other problems of rural areas. A call is made to the global technological community to help provide such technologies. Finally issues of how much energy is needed for sustainable development are discussed.

There is an acute shortage of power for decentralized communities of the rural sector in India even after installing power generation capacity of about 110,000 MW. In order to meet rural energy needs, the decentralized power generation is an alternative measure and can be produced through renewable energy sources. There is tremendous potential of utilizing biomass in India, but direct use of biomass leads to inefficiency. Therefore in order to effectively utilize biomass, it is converted into biofuels such as biodiesels, ethanol, biogas and producer gas etc.

The use of kerosene for lighting and biomass for cooking is predominant throughout rural India. And since provision of grid electricity to rural India is still a far cry, there is an urgent need to develop alternative sources of liquid fuels for lighting