Amalta Gupta

Amalta Gupta

MESc Candidate 2023
Yale School of the Environment
Amalta Gupta is a second year MESc candidate at the School of the Environment. She is interested in working on increasing access to clean energy at the household level in rural India. For her master’s thesis she is collaborating with her advisor, Dr Narasimha Rao, to conduct a pilot study to analyze the sustained use on Induction Cookstove in peri-urban Indian households.
 
The seventh Sustainable Development Goal set by the United Nation emphasizes that limited access to clean cooking fuel exacerbates health and environmental concerns in underserved communities. Household Air Pollution (HAP) caused by the use of traditional fuel has disproportionate negative health impacts on women and children (James et al., 2020). Moreover, solid fuels contribute 1.0–1.2 Gt CO2e to global carbon emissions (Kar et al., 2019). In 2019, the number of deaths due to HAP in India was about 600,000 (Pandey et al., 2019). While 95% of the country’s urban population uses clean cooking fuel, 72% of rural India continues to rely on harmful solid fuels as a primary or secondary fuel for cooking (IRES, 2021). This inequitable access is primarily driven by the high prices of alternatives and the lack of infrastructure to provide these alternatives. Increasingly, Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) is seen as a viable option to encourage clean cooking in households reliant on solid fuels. However, uptake of LPG in these households is impeded by its cost and time-consuming refill requirement (Gould & Urpelainen, 2018). Exploiting the increased levels of electrification by introducing Electric Cookstoves (ECs) in rural Indian households, offers a novel alternative to carbon-intensive cooking fuel. Therefore, this study aims to look at the effect of increased electrification on the standards of living in rural India, specifically looking at the penetration of electricity in a household’s cooking fuel mix. With the help of grants from the YSE summer fund, TRI and EJ center, I want to study the effect of reliable electricity on the uptake of ECs and address the environmental justice concern arising from the lack of access to clean cooking fuel in rural India. This question can be further broken down into two:
Are households with a higher reliable supply of electricity more likely to adopt ECs?
What are the non-economic variables of electricity supply that influence the adoption of ECs?

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