Clean Cooking: Smoke-Free Kitchens for Every Home
For many families in Nagpur’s low-income settlements, cooking on a traditional chulha means breathing smoke every day. That smoke harms the health of women and children and pollutes the air in and around the home. CFSD’s Clean Cooking program, started in November 2025, helps families move from chulhas to LPG through awareness, savings, and dialogue with local institutions.
What CFSD did
PLA 1: Learning through play. We opened with games, including Ludo, so that the conversation felt natural and the lessons stuck. Through play, we showed participants how cooking on a chulha affects health and why LPG is the better choice. We also shared a simple step every family can take: keeping doors and windows open so that smoke can leave the house.
PLA 2: Seeing the problem. We used posters and drawings to show how smoke affects the people who breathe it every day. Participants wrote messages on the posters themselves, turning awareness into something they owned and could share with their families and neighbours.
PLA 3: Making the switch affordable. We showed women how they can form bachat gats (self-help groups), save regularly and use that money to buy LPG. Using posters and stories, we also encouraged them to keep their savings in the bank so the money is there when they need it.
The change is visible in the women themselves. One participant attended every session and concluded, after seeing the evidence, that LPG is better than the chulha because the smoke harms everyone in the house.
Taking it to the wider community and authorities
Once the sessions were complete, we brought the wider community into the conversation. A meeting of 310 women, held in two groups, included medical officers, ASHA workers, school teachers, corporators, the District Supply Officer and gas agency managers. Its purpose was to explain the harm caused by chulha smoke and the case for switching to LPG. We also met the District Supply Officer and visited the Nagpur FDO office to take the issue to the relevant authorities.
Challenges and the way ahead
Challenges remain. Piped gas lines cannot yet reach many slum settlements, so the switch depends on families being able to afford and refill cylinders. But awareness is growing, and more families are choosing gas over chulhas, protecting their health and the air their neighbourhoods breathe.
