On Friday, May 10, Asar hosted an ideation meetup on ‘Mitigating Household Air Pollution in Delhi’s Low-Income Neighborhoods’ at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. Over 30 participants from diverse sectors and focus areas including clean cooking, air pollution, climate change, health, housing and urban planning, governance, research and gender advocacy, came together to deliberate on the issue. 🌍🏠💡

Here are some key insights that emerged from the three sessions that were part of the ideation meetup:

➡️The first session highlighted the need to strengthen the discourse around clean cooking in the context of larger issue of black carbon and climate change, use the narrative of inequality in exposure to household air pollution and highlight economic benefits of shifting to clean cooking and medical costs saved💬💰

➡️The second session emphasized the multi-sectoral nature of the clean cooking challenge, requiring coordinated action from various departments such as health, women and child development, urban planning, housing, energy, environment, and corporate affairs. Insights from existing literature were shared to advocate for collaborative efforts across these sectors. 🤝🏢🔍

➡️The third session underscored the importance of exploring alternative clean cooking technologies beyond LPG, such as electric, smokeless solutions, and solar options. Creating community awareness about these alternatives emerged as a crucial step toward sustainable adoption. ☀💡

The meet up was extremely useful for Asar, its partners and the larger ecosystem working on the issue to work on some important solutions for making clean cooking fuel more accessible to disadvantaged communities and explore different ways of doing so.