Rural Energy Transition for Cooking in India—Revisiting the Drivers

The recent analysis from IEA (International Energy Agency) on energy transition in India highlights that cooking continues to be the weakest link in the energy transition process for rural households and that rural energy transition of households to cleaner fuel is nonlinear in nature. Several programs have been designed to plague the voids and address this nonlinearity, but the transition to cleaner alternatives for cooking did not happen in the pace it should ideally have. Therefore, an empirical exercise was carried out at a national level to revisit the disconnect between the income growth and energy transition and identify the drivers of the energy transition process in cooking at the national as well as at the subnational state level for a developing country. The paper adds to the current scholarship on drivers of household energy transition by analyzing the relationship between household energy choices and non-income determinants and proves the nonlinearity in energy consumption of rural households of Bihar. Analyzing unit level record from National Sample Survey, an empirical exercise was carried out by using multinomial logit model to identify the potential determining factors at the individual household and group level. The group effect analysis through fixed and random effect has been conducted purposely to understand if social and cultural norms or community level factors within a village society have any effect on the cooking energy transition of rural households and if that offsets the effect of household income in energy transition for cooking. Furthermore, to statistically examine the perceived non-linearity in the consumption of cooking fuel such as firewood by rural households, Brock–Dechert–Scheinkman (BDS) test was conducted for rural households of 38 districts of Bihar. The analysis helps in inferring that subsidy on modern fuel and/or other cooking alternatives alone may not suffice to drive the transition process, but more targeted intervention rooted in the local cultural context in consonance with social and cultural norms or community level factors could be more effective for sustained rural energy transition.