Spark of inspiration
Jayamma Dumpa knows only too well the difficulties of cooking the old-fashioned way. Outside her tiny one-room house on the outskirts of Hyderabad, she demonstrates how she fabricates a makeshift stove to prepare a meal for her family of seven.
She squats down and packs sawdust into a rickety old metal bucket, with an empty beer bottle placed in the centre. The bottle is removed, leaving a hole to hold her fuel, which she lights using kerosene. Once it gets going, plumes of black, acrid smoke rise quickly into the air.
She burns wood mostly, bought from a market around 2km away and carried back on her head. But when supplies are scarce or times are tough, she makes do. On the ground nearby lies a pile of alternative fuels, including plastic bags and an old punctured football.
Dumpa is just one of an estimated 2.7bn people worldwide who depend on food cooked on rudimentary or traditional stoves, roughly a third of them living in India. The practice is an important, if lesser-known, contributor to climate change. Its health effects can be severe, too. “Every year we see about 2m deaths as a result of smoke from these traditional stoves,” says Radha Muthiah, executive director of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a campaigning body. “That is a life lost every 16 seconds or so.”