Livelihood and household clean cooking challenges in rural India: A community-based participatory approach for solutions

Clean cooking in rural India faces bottlenecks impeding the attainment of sustainable development goal 7 despite various government interventions to propagate clean cooking. This hindrance often has a direct variation with the livelihood challenges of the people alongside some other factors. Following this, a participatory research approach was employed to identify the challenges, the interlinkages with livelihood and the sustainable solutions to improve livelihood through clean cooking solutions. In this work, the study was focused on a rural village of Guptapada, Khordha District of Odisha state in India. Challenges revealed from the study include the ineffectiveness of Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) and other government schemes, low awareness, lack of access to capital and the need for entrepreneurial skill and capacity development. Based on these, potential sustainable solutions were highlighted to improve livelihood in the village by developing clean cooking interventions. It also redirects governments, agencies and institutions working on developmental projects in rural communities to leverage the opportunity provided by clean cooking to improve the livelihood of the rural dwellers, ensuring sustainability through a participatory research approach.