Using high – frequency household surveys to describe energy use in rural North India during the COVID – 19 pandemic

Using high – frequency household surveys to describe energy use in rural North India during the COVID – 19 pandemic

Surveys were designed to be relatively rapid—between 10 and 15minutes(Jharkhand) and 5 and 10minutes (Bihar).Survey questions focused on household lighting and cooking, the costs and accessibility of modern fuels and the reasons that households reported using fuels as they did over the course of the pandemic. The Jharkhand survey was administered six times between July 2020 and July 2021 to a panel of 882 rural households. At baseline, 85% of households were grid electrified, and an additional 2%had access to electricity from a micro-grid or a solar home system; still, 24%used kerosene lamps as their primary lighting source. Two-thirds of participants reported mixed use (also known as stacking) of a polluting cooking fuel with LPG, and one-third reported exclusively using polluting fuels; exclusive LPG use was nearly non-existent (<1%). Between the baseline survey in 2019 and the COVID surveys described here, one-third of households without LPG had acquired it. The survey in Jharkhand additionally evaluated economic hardships encountered during the pandemic. For the second survey, researchers recruited 450 households from eight districts across Bihar that were selected at random from a pool of 38,000phone numbers registered to individuals living in the state and maintained by Morsel Research and Development Private Limited (based in UttarPradesh, India).

Participants were primary cooks over 18 years of age whore ported use of both biomass and clean fuels for cooking in the week preceding the baseline survey administered in January 2021. After completing the baseline survey, 203 participants were randomly selected and were called once per week for eight weeks. At baseline, 16% of household heads had no formal education, and two-thirds had received a secondary education or greater. One-quarter of participants belonged to the general caste; nearly 60% belonged to the so-called ‘Other Backward Class’. Three-quarters of participants reported that LPG was their main cooking fuel. Primary cooks were almost all female(99.5%,n=1 male).In both study areas, fuel refills were obtained through an LPG cylinder-recirculation model, as is the norm in India. Households either call or visit their local LPG distributor to request a refill. When households purchased refills, they paid the full market/international price (that is, approximately960INR or US$12.84 for a 14.2kg cylinder in January 2022). A subsidy was deposited in the consumer’s bank account sometime later. In addition  to understanding energy-use behaviour during COVID-19, we sought to characterize how refill and subsidy deposit times varied during the pandemic

Location: Uttar Pradesh , Bihar and Jharkhand

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