Impact of Appropriate Cooking Stove Technologies on the Health of Rural Women

Rural households depend on clay stoves called chulhas for the purpose of cooking food. In the chulhas biomass inputs are used as fuel. In general a family of 5 to 6 persons require about 8 kg of fuel per day. The domestic fuel used, comprises of agricultural residues, twigs, cattle dung, and wood particles which constitute about 40% of the total mass. This biomass is usually the waste generated in the family farm, while the wood particles are collected from the surrounding environment, in the neighbourhood. Families living in the rural areas depend on biomass inputs since it is available free of cost. Finding the large availability of the biomass in the environment, the use of traditional chulhas has certain disadvantages where in it can bring only 10 percent of the total heating potential of the fuel into use while the rest of it goes waste. Another disadvantage of the traditional chulhas is that they produce a lot of smoke, soot and unburnt volatile organic matter; this blackens the cooking vessels and also the surroundings like the walls of the kitchen and pollutes the indoor air affecting the health of the family adversely. Though Burning of biomass fuels pollutes the air and the environment, biomass fuels are largely used for cooking food, heating and sometimes lighting in the rural areas and women and small children are constantly exposed to the burning fuels and become victims of pollution as these people are found working within its vicinity all the time. As per the medical reports and major health studies, continued exposure to such an environment leads to lung infection and eye and skin infections. The available interventions to reduce the exposure to such harmful effects include changing the cooking practices and building awareness on the impact of such exposure to smoke on health. Though some interventions have been made by the civil society and the government agencies by introducing innovative cooking practices, yet the technology could not penetrate the mindset nor the kitchens of the rural folk as social, cultural and financial constraints are seen as major challenges to effective an efficient implementation.