On the train to Mukteshwar, Uttarakhand - March 11

(Marc writing) I've spent the last week in India, taking advantage of the week off of spring break to spend two weeks working on pre-baseline focus groups and field visits leading to a new study I am helping to launch to study the demand and adoption of clean cookstove technologies. The second week requires me to miss some classes, which I have arranged to have covered by a colleague and my research assistant.

It has been a very useful first week. This is my first experience working with clean cookstoves, and I am struck by the parallels from the world of water and sanitation, which I know better. Indoor air pollution, environmental degradation (deforestation), and climate emissions are the target of this technology, and many of the same kinds of benefits apply. The obstacles to adoption are also similar: widespread poverty and lack of resources for purchasing such devices (the traditional alternative, the mud chulla, is free), lack of knowledge about health effects of indoor air pollution and the problems assoicated with loss of forest cover, and the simple reality that other things seem to always take precedence over simple improvements that to us would seem so worthwhile.

Over the next two years we will be carrying out interventions designed to increase adoption of these stoves, to see if anything can be done to make a difference on this issue. One particular challenge that has become apparent to me, though, is that the improved stoves have lots of technical problems themselves - not good for cooking certain foods, that make them hard to promote.

So, I am now heading to the mountains (really the foothills of the Himalaya, but still at 8500 feet) to view our second major site and learn how it is similar and different, from what I have seen in the Gangetic plains.