Biomass energy plays a vital role in meeting local energy demand in many regions of the developing world. Biomass is a primary source of energy for close to 2.5 billion people in developing countries. It is easily available to many of the world’s poor and provides vital and affordable energy for cooking, space heating and water heating. Majority of the biomass users, including both domestic users and hotels, have installed traditional, highly polluting cookstoves for varies of needs. These stoves are characterized by very low thermal efficiency which is below 10% in most cases. Inefficient and excessive usage of firewood results in emission of toxic gases like carbon monoxide and damages the indoor air quality adversely which affects the health of the workmen, especially the women and children. Sample studies conducted by Winrock International India indicated a dangerously high level of more than 4200 µg/m3 of carbon monoxide concentration in the ambient near the cooking area. Thus substitution of traditional cook stove technology with the clean and improved technology for direct biomass combustion in developing countries is essential to address poverty and public health issues in rural and some urban areas. Sustainable development must aim at creating universal access to cleaner household technology at least to the extent required to satisfy basic human needs.

In context to the indoor use of biomass, in recent years, we have developed a much more sophisticated understanding of the health and social impacts as well as local and global environmental implications of burning biomass in traditional stoves. As a result, a number of developing-country governments have put together biomass cookstoves programs to deliver improved devices to their populations.

At the same time, we also have improved technologies, innovative deployment models, as well as new monitoring and evaluation technologies that allow us to better implement cookstoves programs. The availability of this richer menu of technology, delivery, and financing options and even greater purchasing power within some segments of biomass users has resulted in cookstoves programs that are diverse in terms of programmatic design.

The current portal aims to showcase the latest development in the cookstove field, in terms of both technology and delivery model. Efforts, made by various organizations across the country, towards the development of the cookstove technology and deployment have also been highlighted in the case study column. To meet the emission standards and at the same time to compare the latest developments with existing one, various organization has considered the revised VITA protocol as their standard testing protocol. In this regard Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India has recognized few centres where the testing and certification can be done as per the adopted testing protocol. The same has been discussed as well in the portal. The portal also aims to in-list the various technological advances done towards the cookstove development by several of the organization all across the world and aims to provide a common knowledge sharing platform for the further course of action. In this regard, a list of the all the cookstove models developed in the country has shown in the portal in the respective column.

Ultimate objective of the current initiative, through the portal, is to provide a common platform for all the participant nations of the world to prepare further course of action to fulfill ultimate common objective, i.e., providing the safe, pollution free and cost effective option to cater the thermal requirement of the cookstove users.

The following flow diagram highlights the overall structure of the portal.

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