Work
- Here the assumption is to double the farmers’ real income (adjusted using the Consumer Price Index) and not the nominal income. ?
- Chand, Ramesh, Raka Saxena, and Simmi Rana. "Estimates and Analysis of Farm Income in India, 1983-84 to 2011-12." Economic and Political Weekly 50.22 (2015): 139-145.APA ?
- Motivation: motivate users to adopt, improvise and develop new ways to cook traditional dishes on these new devices.
- Education: Create awareness about the challenge of household air pollution and need for clean cooking devices.
- Celebration: Celebrate cooking skills of rural cooks and associate positive memories with these devices.
Green Credits, Carbon Credits and several other emerging result based finance instruments are rapidly gaining traction among different stakeholders yet their effective implementation requires a lot of capacity building and awareness creation.
For the last couple of years, I have been running sessions at Indian Institute of Forest Management for senior practitioners and Indian Forest Service (IFS) - officers on these topics in different MDPs and workshops. These sessions and workshops are not only a way to create awareness about these topics on these key emerging areas but also an opportunity to learn about the issues from different stakeholders’ point of view.
These workshops, sessions are also an attempt to reduce the information asymmetry and ensure that the benefits of these financial instruments are shared equitably and fairly.
#CarbonCredits #ClimateFinance #ClimateAction #Education #Career
#AfricaClimateSummit23 Yesterday, I heard young African children talk about how they need to be part of the discussion on climate finance. So good to see the future generation coming forward and demanding a better future. #ClimateAction #AfricaClimateSummit #Nairobi
Meeting innovative Solar enterprises in Kigali
The startup scene in Africa is really turning vibrant. I was in Kigali to participate in an accelerator workshop for the winners of SolarX (20 innovative startups leveraging solar energy to address challenges in energy access, food security, health ..). My session was on “Raising Commercial Capital” and I was a bit concerned as this was just after lunch and it was a two-hour long session. But the kind of participation I saw was unexpected. I was absolutely delighted to see these enterprises taking on the energy access challenge in Africa.
Climate Adaptation Technologies - How India can protect its communities against climate change
Women in India will be at a higher risk given 80% of rural women are employed in the agriculture sector, have lower asset ownership and credit access than men, have child caring responsibilities which prevent migration and are exposed to heightened violence especially during conflict.
Read our take on Climate adaptation technologies- how India can protect its communities against climate change
Doubling Farmers' Income - Making it a reality
Our Prime Minister’s call to double the farmers’s income1 by 2022 is an opportune call as the growth in farmers’ income has stagnated and it caused significant distress to farmers. Doubling the farmers’ income by 2020, if it is achieved, would be a remarkable achievement as it had not been achieved in last 3 decades. The challenge is more steep when it comes to doubling the income of farmers who have less than 10 acres of agricultural land2.
Most of our small and marginal farmers are predominantly engaged in the cultivation of food grains. Almost 38 percent of the total cropped area is used for cultivating rice and wheat. Unfortunately, our per hectare yield for these two crops is quite low. Our rice yield is 3721 kgs/ha and wheat yield is 3177 kgs/ha. China has rice yield of 6775 kgs/ha and wheat yield 4987 kgs/ha. The practice of cultivating food grains using traditional methods in small land holdings is often one of the main reasons of low farm income.
NITI Aayog has listed many interventions and given a strategic direction at macro level to transform agriculture sector and reach the goal of doubling the farmers’ income. However, interventions at micro-level with community/farmers participation need to be promoted to achieve this goal for small and marginal farmers.
A couple of weeks back, a visit to a tribal village in Jharkhand showcased us brilliant examples of community engagement, micro-planning and dedicated focus that achieved the goal of doubling the farmers’ income in less 3 years. Tata Trusts in partnership with local NGO partners has transformed the agriculture practices of many tribal villages in Jharkhand.
The villages, we visited were 15-20 kms from Khunti, some yet to get functional road connectivity, electricity and proper mobile network coverage. Villagers (almost all from Munda tribe) have been engaged in the their traditional agriculture and lac cultivation for their livelihood, and had very low income from their fields. The per household income ranged from INR 20-40K per year. But in last 2-3 years, most of the households in these villages have doubled their income by changing their agriculture practices and establishing market linkages to get better value for the crop.
Collectives for Integrated Livelihood Initiatives (CINI), a Tata Trust supported initiative, worked extensively on understanding the cropping pattern, village resources, agriculture practices and the overall infrastructural challenges of each village/cluster.The intervention design and strategy leveraged the local knowledge, and practices and community leaders. The key feature of these interventions that worked as per my understanding are the following and provide some good learning for similar projects.
a) Income Diversification- Providing at least three sources of income to each households-Apart from agriculture, lac cultivation or sericulture, and rearing of pigs were promoted for additional sources of income.
b) Transition from diverse low value crops to selected high value crops-Making a large number of farmers to switch from their traditional crop to a particular high value crop is not easy. But to achieve a viable scale and marketable volume it is essential. In Khunti cluster, the selected crop is a high yielding variety of tomatoes which has a ready market in Jharkhand and Bihar. The intense community mobilization make it possible that a large number of farmers agreed to adopt a particular crop and suggested agriculture techniques.
c) Providing market linkages by aggregating farmers' produce- Aggregation of produce and planned harvesting ensured that intermediaries and vendors started procuring from these villages for the first time.
d) Community Engagement and Participation- Local resource persons, recruited from village, were given responsibility to ensure that all farmers are following the prescribed schedule for agriculture operations. All key activities, milestones were recorded. Local resource persons and the community leader made it sure that interventions implemented as per their design.
Addressing Household Air Pollution and Celebrating Cooking : Dharma Chef
Household Air Pollution (HAP) is emerging as a major health risk and is responsible for more than 4.3 million premature deaths globally every year. The biggest and most common contributor to HAP is the use of biomass fuels for cooking in our traditional cookstoves. Availability of free biomass, free traditional cookstoves, and our age-old and ingrained cooking practices, which revolve around these traditional cookstoves make these polluting and health threatening cookstoves quite attractive and ‘comforting’ to majority of rural households.
Making these household move from cooking on traditional cookstoves to LPG or other clean cooking solutions such as induction stove, advanced biomass cookstoves can result in substantial economic, health and environmental benefits. Yet, households have been very stubborn in their use of traditional cookstoves and fuels. The transition from traditional cookstoves to new generation cooking devices is excruciatingly slow and frustrating.
While there are many factors such as product performance, cleaner fuel availability and pricing that can be attributed to this continued use of inefficient traditional cookstove and slow adoption of dvanced biomass cookstove, the need for behaviour change has been identified as of the most significant factors. In fact, some studies suggest that it might be even more critical than the economical factors.
"Empirical work demonstrates that people do not make decisions by taking into account all costs and benefits. People want to conform to social expectations. People do not have unchanging or arbitrarily changing tastes. Preferences depend on the context in which they are elicited and on the social institutions that have formed the interpretive framework which individuals see the world."- (Mind Society and Behaviour, World Bank, 2015).
The transition is complex for a common user. The complexity of transition often decides against the health and economic benefits of the clean cooking devices. It requires them to adopt to a new device, a new way of cooking and probably some compromise on the taste.
“It overcooked my rice.”
“The chapatis were not as good as my regular chapatis.”
“My family did not like the taste of food prepared on this.”
“I cannot cook my regular dishes on this.”
The above are the most common remarks one gets to hear in the early transition efforts. The transition becomes a drab and often there are negative memories that get associated with the new devices.
These problem forced us to take a different route for promoting transition to clean cooking devices. Something that was not dull, something that was exciting and resulted in associating positive memories with the transition. Something that excited and motivated users enough to make them find a way to overcome the early adoption challenges. We launched a cooking competition for rural households: “Dharma Chef”.
A multi-stage state level competition in which participants cook traditional and fusion dishes on clean cooking devices (such as induction stove, or advance biomass cookstove). While on surface it was just like any other cooking competition, it was designed to achieve the following:
The campaign is doing very well on all these counts. We have got people to make “Roti” on induction.. Something that many consider quite a challenge.. The event not only gathered the women (who take the responsibility of cooking in rural India) but their whole family participated. They cheered them up while she cooked. The campaign is also making all the winning recipes compiled into a cookbook and the next steps is to make the videos available on dedicated youtube channel.
Dharma Chef campaign is being run by Dharma Life and supported by Tata Trusts. At present the campaign is running in Gujarat but soon it is going to be launched in other states as well.
Lighting Up Young Minds
One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.
-Agatha Christie
Indeed, a happy childhood is something that every kid deserves. On this literacy day, we started something that was our contribution to add happiness to some childhoods. We (know more about what we do) started a campaign titled “Lighting Up Young Minds”. The objective of this campaign is to inculcate the habit of reading in rural children and make it a fun activity.
Personally, I vouch for the magical effect that reading has on growing up children. It can transform and transfigure childhoods. Unfortunately, our rural kids often do not have either access to quality reading material; or the boring academic books have made reading a drab and dull activity. We want to make reading a fun activity and inculcate the habit of reading.
So, we partnered with Pratham Books for getting some quality reading content and conducted reading sessions at more than 250 locations to start the campaign. We reached more than 17000 children in a single day.
Each reading session was followed by a painting competition and some fun activities for children. From ‘Chhota Bheem’ to ‘Indian national flag’... their imagination captured it all.
This is just a start for us. We are looking to reach more than 100,000 children on by this Children’s Day. We want to make this a regular event and get more people, partners to engage in this. Drop us a line in the comments if you want to contribute in our this goal.
Killer in the kitchen
Several news articles highlighted the deteriorating air quality in Delhi and its impact on health. Many of my friends and colleagues started contemplating options that can save them from air-pollution. They discussed options ranging from buying masks and air-purifiers to shifting to a city with better air quality. These frequent news and articles about air-pollution made them really concerned.
Mainstream media has an unparalleled capacity of influencing our priorities. However, mainstream media is very stubbornly selective in what it chooses to highlight and what it chooses to ignore.
One such issue that never got duly highlighted by the mainstream media is the impact of household air pollution (HAP) on health.
Annually more than 4.3 million deaths occur due to HAP. The deaths are caused by HAP from household cooking. HAP is a silent killer in many households. The majority of victims are women and children from economically backward rural population. These households use solid fuels such as wood, crop-residue, dung, charcoal etc in their traditional cookstoves, often made of three stones put together. There are more than 3 billion still dependent on solid fuel for their cooking energy needs (see here for more info).
These lives can be saved if these households shift to cleaner cooking fuel such as liquid petroleum gas (LPG), electricity; or improved biomass cookstoves which can be used with solid fuels but emissions are within the permissible safe limit. In fact, improved biomass cookstoves make a very good case for replacing traditional cookstoves. These can be used with locally available fuel and are considerable cheaper (cost USD 10–70) than LPG. Sadly, moving from traditional cookstoves to clean cooking devices is not an easy transition.
LPG is expensive and access to reliable and affordable electricity is limited. Furthermore, households have limited budget for cooking fuel and stoves. Many households build their own cookstoves and collect fuels at nominal or no cost. This makes them reluctant to spend a significant sum of money from their limited resources. Households are also not aware of the extent of health risk. Most believe that smoke is just an irritating inconvenience associated with cooking. In some areas, LPG distribution network disappoints many of the households that aspire to get LPG.
There are behavioural challenges as well. Households have been using traditional cookstoves since generations. The traditional cookstove is central in many of rituals and festivals. Switching to a new cooking devices often requires changing the way a person cooks or compromising the convenience of their age-old cooking methods. Improved cookstoves are also not seen as aspirational as LPGs or induction cooker. Several households also do not feel comfortable paying the upfront cost of improved cookstoves despite its economic and health benefits.
All of the above challenges are surmountable. But the issue itself has not got its due attention from policy makers and most importantly from the users of traditional cookstoves. Households do not feel the need to move from life threatening inefficient traditional cookstoves. They have limited awareness on its ill-effects and fail to see the benefits of clean cooking devices in context of its cost.
Creating mass awareness about the ill-effects of emission from traditional cookstoves, and need for switching to a clean cooking device is essential in solving this problem. Our media can play a monumental role. I hope more main-stream media houses start highlighting this issue so that it goes up in the priority list of policy makers and households.
Power to the People
No this is not the John Lennon’s famous song.. this is the title of the report which kept me busy for almost two years and the main reason why there were no updates on this blog. Finally the study is complete and the report is done, and the feedback and comments about the report made me feel that it was worth the effort.
If you are wondering what this report is all about… this report estimates the market potential for clean technology products and services for low income households in India and provides an overview of the sector to potential investors and other stakeholders. Yes, clean technology for low income households has been on theme I have been working for almost three years now. While the sector is still in very early stage I am happy to see the way it is growing. If you are interested in clean energy or base of the pyramid (BoP) market, I would suggest you to go through the report and comment.
Now, since I am relatively free I am going to read some books, visit a few places or just simply stay put at my home and watch some movies. Meanwhile, I already started working on my list of 100 most popular/recommended books of modern times. Will update about the list and my recent reads in my next post.
Economic Environment Index
Last week we launched our Economic Environment Index (earlier it was called Economic Governance Index) and like any other index it got its fair (okey more than fair share of criticism and controversy). You can check the ranking and details on www.economicgovernance.com.
Economic Environment Index, being first of its kind ranking of districts, got a lot of media coverage and the pre launch coverage in TOI created a lot of unwarranted controversy, though it got us on the front page of Times of India. This index was primarily aimed at capturing variation within the state and focus attention on the gaps and it incorporates data from both the households and the business units.
Here are some of the links to get more on the Index.
Www.economicgovernance.com http://www.moneycontrol.com Times of India The Economic Times
Somewhere in Gabon
Borrowed sunglasses to cover my infected eyes..
Gabon Upcountry
After breakfast, there was nothing to do, so I just spent some time on my laptop, listening to those songs which I have stored, just for the single reason, that I got it from somewhere and my laptop had a lot of space. Sometimes you have so much time that if you believe in the old saying that time is money, you will feel like a billionaire. It was just like that. My guide here has gone to Libreville for a meeting and I was here alone, fighting with the French language and giving a very tough time to the person to whom I am talking too.
One of my seniors told me, don’t take tension that you don’t know French, make other people tense that you don’t know French. And let him understand. So basically I was doing the same thing.
Afternoon, Paul came to pick me up and in his heavily accented but fairly good English explained to me that we are going to visit the city and places around it. What more I could have asked for! Really great. Outside my hotel, there was an old Landcruiser waiting for me. I just took my laptop, camera and passport and was ready for action. First, we visited a nearby village in Makokou and it was really beautiful. Located on the banks of a river ‘La river de obenduâ’, I asked for the name but Paul’sheavy accented reply and my ears’ refusal to get accustomed to that accent, suggested me to not waste time getting the right name.
I went to the river and was surprised to see that the color of the water was black. O my god, I am seeing a black river in this Dark Continent! I asked the reason to Paul, expecting a really interesting answer. But the result was a dud. He simply told this due to the high content of iron ore. Suddenly something caught my attention, some people were there washing their cars in the river, and alongside them some girls taking bath.
Returning back to my hotel, I was lucky enough to have an encounter that I can never forget. On the way, Paul suddenly stopped the car, and I could see some people moving and making noise. I asked the reason and he told me to get the camera, photo, photo.. I was unable to understand anything that happened, why this fellow is asking me to capture pics of these people. “le serpent” “What?” “Snake” Then I looked at the crowd, on the ground there was a huge black snake moving, and two three-person equipped with small sticks were there to tackle him and 20–30 people around them. I took out my camera and from the car itself took some snaps.
I asked about the snake and the answer was it is a black cobra. One of the most deadly snakes on the planet. And those people were treating him like a harmless non-poisonous creature. Within a few seconds, two-three strikes with the small sticks and the black cobra was flat on the ground.
Though still moving rapidly, unable to go anywhere. I was mesmerized by their skill.