Promoting smokeless villages in India
A recent global health survey, whose findings were described in the journal Nature, found that smoke from domestic fires causes some 4 million premature deaths a year, with over a quarter of these being in India. Here, two-thirds of all households cook their meals on traditional stoves, or chulha, using firewood. Smoke from the firewood is the prime source of indoor air pollution.
Encouraging families to cook by other means is now a national priority, and the village of Kinnarhalli, on the outskirts of the town of Hassan in Karnataka, has shown what the future could look like. On 4th February 2016, Kinnarhalli was declared a smokeless village in a ceremony organized by the University of Agricultural Sciences Bangalore (UASB) and the District Council of Hassan. Working in partnership with the World Agroforestry Centre, they had helped the villagers revolutionize their energy use and cooking methods.
“Kinnarhalli is one of the pilot villages for our biofuels programme in India,” says programme director Navin Sharma. “We want to introduce clean energy systems in rural areas and this village will act as a model for others in the region.”
Out of the 79 households in Kinnarhalli, 77 now have biogas facilities which use locally available resources such as cow dung, oilcake from tree seeds, oilseeds from perennial crops and organic waste. The oilcake, a by-product of oil extraction from tree seeds, acts as a catalyst which enhances biogas production. Experiments show that a kilogram of oilcake can increase production by 200 to 250L in a biogas plant producing 2000L of gas a day. The differential is enough to satisfy the cooking requirements of a family with seven members.
This is just one of the achievements of a larger programme which is encouraging local communities to adopt biofuels as a replacement for firewood and liquified petroleum gas (LPG). “We see this as a good example of technology adoption using locally available resources to produce clean energy solutions,” says Sharma.
