National and Subnational Drivers for Cooking Energy Consumption in Rural India

Abstract

BackgroundThe energy transition pattern in India highlights that cooking continues to be the weakest link in the energy transition process for rural households. The government is trying to subsidize LPG for rural families to increase usage of LPG in India for a clean cooking energy transition. The paper endeavors to fill the void by revisiting the nature and degree of the rural energy transition for cooking in India. MethodologyUsing a multinomial logit model, the potential drivers at the individual household and group level have been identified. The group effect analysis has been conducted purposely to understand if social and cultural norms or -level factors within a village society affect the cooking energy transition of households in rural India and if that prevails over the income effect. At the sub-national level, an estimate of energy inequality has been derived by applying social choice-based Atkinson Inequality measure to examine the connection between higher energy inequality in primary fuel used for cooking and higher income inequality. In addition, the Brock-Dechert-Scheinkman (BDS) test on firewood consumption has been conducted for poor energy households from 38 districts of Bihar, one of the highest energy-poor states, to statistically examine the perceived nonlinearity in the dynamics of energy transition/fuel choice in cooking for rural households. ResultsThe analysis at the national level indicates the importance of local and cultural factors that leads to the nonlinearity in the probability of the switchover from firewood to other clean fuel options. Conclusions SummaryThe paper highlights if subsidies on modern fuel and/or other cooking alternatives alone drive the transition process and examines the validity of the energy ladder hypothesis in the case of rural cooking energy transition and the drivers of the energy transition at the national and sub-national level. Potential ImplicationsThe state-level analysis done for Bihar and across various districts corroborates this finding and provides an important direction towards local context-specific policy-making in the long term.