Electricity unreliability: Implications for household air pollution (India)

Poor household air quality in low income settings remains a major global problem, largely because of continued high reliance on solid fuels and highly polluting cooking technology. Lack of access to reliable electricity, meanwhile, impedes adoption of potentially transformative household technologies that enhance productivity, health, and well-being, especially of women. This project aims to identify the causal impacts of electric induction stoves on levels of particulate matter and other outcomes in rural India. These stoves are low cost and dependable, and are achieving increasing penetration in many areas where access to the grid has improved, as evidenced by the rapidly growing market for these technologies in many parts of India. Our approach is to estimate how air quality changes as a function of unplanned (plausibly exogenous) grid outages.

Main research collaborators:

• Faraz Usmani, Mike Bergin, Subhrendu Pattanayak (Duke)
• E. Somanathan (Indian Statistical Institute)