India to offer prize for cleanest stove…..PADMAPARNA GHOSH
In a bid to improve the health of women in rural areas, the government plans to institute a global prize for the cleanest and most efficient cooking stove in collaboration with a US-based non-profit agency and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.
The website of XPrize Foundation, which works on education and innovation, said the partnership will help create a global competition to develop affordable and clean-burning cookstove technologies.
The move is part of the new and renewable energy ministry’s national biomass cookstoves initiatives, launched in December 2009, said Gauri Singh, joint secretary at the ministry.
A clean cookstove technology can have a significant impact on reducing the emission of carbon dioxide, blamed by scientists for global warming and large-scale climate change, she said.
We will also be able to get motivated teams on this project. Normally, in such processes, the teams can also put together financiers, which will take this project to reality. So it’s not just a product in the lab but also the entire value chain which has a viable market and financiers, Singh added.
An estimated 80% of energy used for cooking in India comes from biomass; much of it is burnt in traditional stoves, or chulhas, that cause pollution and health problems.
Young girls and women collect and process the biomass used for cooking, wasting time they could have spent on education and other pursuits.
The ministry’s biomass cookstoves initiative aims to provide a clean cooking energy option to 75% rural households and 22% urban households that use biomass for cooking. Some years ago, the government had distributed 35 million cookstoves under another initiative–but it was discontinued.
Singh said the potential winner of the prize would have a good combustion chamber, be flexible enough to cook various kinds of cuisine and handle all kinds of biomass, as different regions use different sources for the fuel.
Mint could not contact the XPrize Foundation.
India has the largest number of people exposed to dirty household fuels, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research. More than a quarter of all deaths due to indoor air pollution in developing countries occur in India.
The World Health Organization puts the number of fatalities in India at 500,000 a year to indoor air pollution, of which a majority are women and children.
Ambuj Sagar, Vipula and Mahesh Chaturvedi chair and professor of policy studies at IIT-Delhi, is also involved in this initiative.
The notion of an innovation prize is to induce it (innovation), Sagar said.
Normally the government funds R&D (research and development), but here you are turning it around. There is a prize at the end and you only pay out when you already have achieved the objective. Plus, you have a limitless global talent pool to choose from.