What's Cooking Up During COVID? - Impact of the Pandemic on Clean Fuel Usage in India

This study explores whether the outbreak of COVID-19 affects clean fuel adoption in rural India. We make use of the fifth wave of the National Family and Health Survey conducted from 2019 to 2021 and focus on districts in which the survey was conducted both in the pre-pandemic and post-outbreak periods and utilize the exposure of households to the pandemic depending on the date of survey for identification. We find that the pandemic led to a significant reduction in the use of clean fuel for cooking purposes. We are able to establish that this fall in clean fuel usage is not a mere time trend since we do not find any evidence of a negative trend in clean fuel usage during the pre-pandemic period. Additionally, there is no reduction in clean fuel usage for households in states where the survey was conducted entirely during the pre-pandemic period. Our results remain robust in the presence of potential endogeneity due to unobserved factors in the system. Further, the negative impact is found to be more pronounced for economically vulnerable households. Even employing a difference-in-difference model using the previous round of survey, we find a lower likelihood of clean fuel usage among households where the survey was conducted post the outbreak vis-à-vis those in districts where survey was conducted in pre-pandemic period after accounting for differences in district characteristics. The findings underscore the need for policies, including subsidies and reducing refilling costs of liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, to sustain clean fuel use in the wake of the pandemic