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Analysis Study Research Paper | Economics | India | Volume 12 Issue 4, April 2023

Has Financial Autonomy of Indian Women Any Potential to Accelerate Transitions to Clean Fuel?

Dr. Barnali Basu (Banerjee)

Abstract: Women are principally responsible for collection and use of fuel in many low-income countries, and women's empowerment has been identified as key to accelerating progress towards the sustainable development goals (SDGs). WHO, under its indoor air quality guidelines, defines solid fuels (coal plus biomass such as charcoal, wood, dung, and crop residues) and kerosene as 'polluting', and other fuels, such as electricity, LPG, biogas and natural gas as 'clean'. As income rises, households move away from traditional fuels like wood, crop wastes and dung to adopt intermediate fuels like charcoal, coal and kerosene, and then to modern, less polluting fuels, including gas and electricity. My objective is to examine whether there is any association between women's empowerment and household fuel use at national-level across India, and also to quantify the associations between different dimensions of women's empowerment and household fuel use at national-level across India. I have applied binary logistic regression. The data is analyzed using Stata13. In this paper, I have shown that households in which women have greater empowerment in the arena of decision making and control over expenditure decisions appear to be more likely to invest in the usage of clean cooking fuels. These results point to the importance of incorporating gender into our considerations as we think about ways of encouraging households to move away from the use of solid fuels to that of clean fuels.

Keywords: women, fuel, clean, polluting, environment, empowerment

Edition: Volume 12 Issue 4, April 2023,

Pages: 1882 - 1886