solid fuels

I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;

These are the lines from the poem-‘past and present’ written by Thomas Hood. But we remember, we remember; the house where we were born; the little window where the smoke use to go out at morning to evening to morning! This was scenario of a decade ago in rural as well as urban area. Today modern fuels like LPG, gober gas, solar power have taken over the place of firewood, coal, cake of cow-dung.
But though technology has advanced and is also available at reasonable price, people are still bent on sticking to traditional practices such as this. A report by WHO says that half of the world’s population still does cooking using solid fuels! ‘smoke from using fuels like wood, dung, coke etc in the kitchen room is equivalent to breathing in 40 cigarettes a day’ the report says.
‘Two-three years back I was always suffering from cough, as we were using wood as main fuel for cooking. When we started using of LPG, cough melted gradually and now I am happy with cooking using LPG’ says Annapurna B. Rangrej, a teacher of Gajendragad in Ron taluk. But she also adds that, there is necessity of wood for heating the water for bath. Ofcourse Gajendragad is a small town, where LPG is available easily. But in rural area, still there is no proper supply of LPG. ‘As our village is 25 kms away from our taluk center, who supplies LPG to us? So it has become our custom to burn ourself with wood’ disquests Nagaratna Sulibhavi, an uneducated house-wife of Kataral village of Koppal dist.

According to a survey, three-quarters of all households in India, comprising more than nine-tenths of rural households and one-third of urban households, used traditional fuels like wood and dung as main fuel in 1999-2000.
As Dr. Umesh Sullad, a government practitioner of Balutgi village in Karwar dist., says-rural woman has become main victim of such solid fuels.  She suffers a lot due to

(note: article is incomplete)