Will “Modern Wood Stoves” Sell in Chhota Udepur, India?
About three months ago I spent a day in eastern Gujarat – a village called Virpur and a town called Chhota Udepur. It was my first time. In the Chhota Udepur market, I found a “stove shop”; it was selling LPG stoves with a large single burner for the commercial/institutional customers. I went in the shop and talked to the owners. The old man has been selling and repairing kerosene stoves and lamps for some 40 years. He still has kerosene lamps (electricity is fairly extensive and the supplies are reliable, so kerosene is used as backup or for farm use, or for the poorest people with low-quality homes or no homes) and also sells metal wood and charcoal stoves. The colorful small cylinders are for pressurized kerosene stoves. Fuelwood is sold for about 8-10 USc/kg, high for a relatively small town. Another is of a van making LPG cylinder delivery to homes.
I am learning Gujarat is unusual – my village of some 3,000-4,000 people back in 1940 used to have coal and charcoal; kerosene came in the 1950s and LPG in the 1970s. But, apart from the demand side (affordability, readiness to change), the existence of delivery chains such as these also played a great role. For towns like Chhota Udepur, LPG stoves from LPG franchisees started in the 1980s and the 1990s, but even then it was up to this small stove shop to innovate and make stoves for the commercial, institutional market (and repair the household LPG stoves cheaply).
After talking to the shop-keeper, I walked across to a tea-seller on a bicycle cart. He had an LPG bottle and a stove that sounded (loud hissing) like the kerosene pressure stove (Primus in my childhood). I was puzzled. This wasn’t the ring burner with holes all around that is usual with LPG stoves small and large. The man showed me the burner – looked like a pipe, about an inch wide, straight up. He had a pilot light, and regulated gas flow with a knob. He didn’t have to light the burner, the gas flow was fast, and he could heat up his aluminum kettle where he kept tea ready, serve me a cup, and turn the stove off.
How many “improved,” “advanced,” “fortified” – or let’s say “modern,” “gas-like” – wood stoves will reach such shops and such users, if not in Gujarat (which has a lot of wood/dung use in villages) then other parts of India and elsewhere in the world?
I could fantasize that tomorrow’s teenagers – new wives too, since many girls are married before they are 18 – can be marketed to by use of mobile phones and that shops like these will become a relic of the past, but these shops will keep serving the current generations till the owners die out.
