No More Soot for Rural Women

Fuel efficient stove reduces indoor pollution to give cleaner cooking experience for women in India.

Enter a house in an Indian village and you see a hazy mist around. The smoke emerging from burning of wood in the cooking stove fills the house. Cooking in the open kitchen, on a stove using solid fuels such as wood, coal, or dung is common in villages across India.

Cooking on a Leo stove Credit: Prakti Design Lab

Smoke-filled kitchens could soon become a thing of the past, thanks to the efforts of a group of social entrepreneurs
under the banner Prakti, led by a Moroccan, Mouhsine Serrar, a long-time resident of San Francisco who moved his base to southern India in recent years.

Prakti has recently developed an environment-friendly cooking stove range, called Leo, to make cooking a cleaner and healthier experience for women in Indian villages. With shoestring budgets and little resources, Prakti is dedicated towards improving lives of the poor. They have chosen to start with India because it has a vast population living in the BOP.

Prakti has thoughtfully designed and engineered the Leo stoves for communities that “deserve the best but cannot afford it in general”. The Leo stoves are expected to be fuel efficient and safe to use. One Leo stove could help a family of five save 2 kg of wood per day, or nearly one ton per year. This also means that the user can recover the cost of the stove, Rs 900 ($19) in six months, by saving on fuel consumption.

“Globally, each day about 1 kg of wood is burnt per person, which means three billion kilogram of wood is burned a day! Reducing this by just 40 percent would really mean something and make a substantial difference. This is what Leo aims to do,” says Mouhsine Serrar, CEO of Prakti.

More than half of the world’s population—three billion people—cook their food and heat their homes by burning coal and biomass, including wood, dung, and crop residues, in open fires or rudimentary stoves. Of this, 1.5 million people die every year because of indoor air pollution, according to a WHO report (2006). And therefore indoor air pollution has been rated among the top 10 global health risks.

The traditional cooking stoves are inefficient in burning solid fuels. Moreover, cooking with wood, coal, or dung creates a dangerous mix of various pollutants and health-damaging gases. Indoor pollution is a major risk factor for pneumonia among children and chronic respiratory disease among adults.

Indoor air pollution has been around since the Stone Age. Yet, international development agendas still fail to recognize the importance of providing clean energy to the people living at the “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP). The engineers at Prakti Design Lab in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, have done their bit to make a difference to this hazy world.

The Leo stove is likely to use 42 percent less fuel and reduce the carbon emission per stove by about 70 percent, excelling the highest standards in fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emission in the world. And as it exposes the cook to less heat and less pollution, it is also likely to reduce the risk of respiratory disease.

After being tested for three years in 23 households in a village in Pondicherry, the Leo stove has been redesigned to make it easy to clean, carry, and provide better hygiene in the house. Insulated material has been used in the stove to improve combustion. Bottom of the stove has been made removable for easy and economical replacement of spare parts. Three models of Leo are currently available in the market: with chimney, single pot, or with sliding door.

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Currently, the Leo stoves are being distributed in Karnataka and Gujarat by SELCO Solar, a social enterprise that provides sustainable energy solutions to under-served households and businesses.

Recently, the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA), U.S. honored Prakti with 2009 Special Achievement Award for fighting indoor air pollution through its Leo stoves.