Utkarsha A Singh, PhD

Wavering weather and unpredictable monsoons due to climate change in the last few decades have destabilised Indian agriculture and put our food security at risk. Although policies that cater to sustainable development have been introduced, only time will show their impact. In the meantime, farmers will have to find ways to cope with the temperamental monsoons to reduce crop failure, while also facing other challenges including poverty, malnutrition, debt and illiteracy.

In a new study, research

According to the 2011 Census, around 78% of rural and 14% of the urban households in India used conventional solid fuels like wood, dry grass, and cow dung cakes to cook. The harmful pollutants emitted by burning these fuels affected women and children severely, resulting in respiratory illnesses. Hence in 2016, the government introduced the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY or the Ujjwala scheme) to transform the use of cooking energy by distributing LPG connections either free of cost or at

As a girl who often visited my grandparent’s village in the foothills of the Shivaliks, I recollect the morning trips we would take to gather twigs, dry grass, cow dung cakes and wood, to be used as fuel for the chulha or the stove. During most of the day, the women of the house sat cooking and coughing their lungs out in a murky stifling kitchen. Statistics show that such smoke-filled kitchens took the lives of 1.2 lakh people in 2015.

The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojna (PMUY), introduced in 201