These Researchers Find A Way To Control Indoor Air Pollution In India

Although outdoor air pollution has gained lots of attention from the whole world, indoor air pollution is another story. However, the World Health Organization lists that there are about millions of deaths per year caused by the second one.

In terms of indoor air pollution, India is known to have an extremely high rate. The reason behind it is the fact that people in the country often use solid fuels from charcoal to firewood to cook food indoors in traditional stoves or open fires.

When these fuels are burnt, they produce a large amount of smoke that kills both young children and women – these people appear in the kitchen the most.

A researcher team from the University of British Columbia in Canada has recently published a study in Nature Energy to discuss a program given by the Indian government to handle this issue. In addition, they also analyzed the duration the population will accept this program.

Back to three years ago, in 2016, a big project called the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (abbreviated as PMUY) was first introduced by the Indian government to handle a persistent issue.

The purpose of this program is to encourage Indians to use Liquified Petroleum Gas (or LPG) – a fuel replacement for cooking.

Accordingly, the government recommends its people purchase adequate stoves or install cylinders of LPG. And next, they will get subsidies and loans, instead of paying for installation costs.

After its 35-month launch, the program has brought a lot of benefits to about 70 million of Indians from rural areas, including women and young children. Its most important issue is how to keep participants following the program as long as possible.

In a bid to ensure fairness for their reports, the researchers didn’t deploy self-reported data and decided to study the data based on LPG sales.

Although there are a large number of participants of the PMUY program, they tend to use the LPG interruptedly in more than 16 months the researchers conducted the study. Accordingly, families in rural areas just use around 50% of the LPG amount which would be necessary to meet the cooking demands of a family in reality.

On average, each family needs about 10 LPG cylinders; however, according to the revelation from the researcher team, Indians use only 4.7 cylinders per year.

In addition, they also revealed that the use of LPG in India was determined by the seasonal price variations. For example, in summer months, there was a drop of 10 percent in LPG sales.

The major author Abhishek Kar said,