India has over 800 million people without access to clean cooking fuel. A well-known, but under-researched aspect of poor access to clean energy is its cost on women's health and well-being. It is seen that in solid-fuel-using homes in India, non-smoking women's cough probabilities are 30 percent to 60 percent higher than non-smoking men's. It was noted that electricity reduces the risk of cough by roughly 35–50% in non-smoking men and women in both rural and urban families, helping to close the gender disparity in rural households.
Despite the fact that clean energy has long been a policy priority of Indian governments, just 9% of households completed a complete shift to clean energy between 2005 and 2011, while 16.4% made a partial transition. The Government initiatives in India and worldwide should focus on enhancing the price, supply, and dependability of clean fuels in order to enable a complete household energy shift and aid a clean energy transition. The government of India should focus on improving the affordability, supply, and reliability of clean fuels in enabling a complete household energy transition and help address key issues in gender inequality.
The smoke inhaled by women from filthy fuel is comparable to burning 400 cigarettes in an hour, according to a World Health Organization report. Given that most men do not cook, health disparities between men and women are a direct result of differing exposure to dangerous chemicals. The evidence on the health effects of unclean fuel is limited, and it primarily focuses on children's health outcomes, such as newborn fatalities and infant mortality. As a result, there is little data on how energy poverty affects women's health.
Understanding the health effects of unclean fuel consumption for women is especially essential because gender discrimination in nutrition and education results in overall poor health conditions for women in many developing nations.
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