Biomass resources have been, are, and will be a major contributor to the energy solutions in India. Even today, we have over 600 million people in the country dependent on traditional biomass for meeting their cooking energy requirements using traditional cook stoves. Even in urban areas, comprising a slum population of 30 per cent, the use of biomass is highly prevalent.

Biomass energy resources are both a solution to the environment and climate change problems in the country and also a contributor to the problems. For example, indoor air pollution from biomass burning in cook stoves has been recognized as the largest killer in South Asia, while biomass burning also contributes substantially to ambient air pollution. From a climate change perspective, the burning of biomass leads to emissions of black carbon which falls in the category of a short lived carbon pollutant (SLCP). In essence, black carbon and other volatile pollutants emitted through biomass burning exacerbate the climate impacts of other greenhouse gases accumulated in earth atmosphere, although these SLCPs have a significantly short life in the earth’s atmosphere as compared to other greenhouse gas pollutants.

Focussed interventions aimed at improving the efficiencies of cookstoves can potentially reduce the demand for biomass for this purpose to a mere 25–30 per cent of its current use, thereby significantly reducing the emissions of various pollutants and the concomitant impact on health of women and children in particular. The release of this biomass use from cooking can also add to the pool of other non-food biomass resources that can be deployed in efficient biomass-based power generation technologies to contribute to India’s energy independence and a greater security of supply—particularly in rural areas.

The Government of India needs to have a mission oriented programme for biomass energy development and use, in a similar fashion as we have the National Solar Mission. The one caveat here would be that the programme for biomass energy exploitation would necessarily cover a number of sectors in the economy, thereby, making it more complex to design and implement as compared to the Solar Mission. At a minimum, such a mission would involve the ministries of Agriculture, Water, Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Food Processing, New and Renewable Energy, Urban Development and Science and Technology at the central level. At the state level, all municipal bodies would also have to be part of an integrated solution seeking. With this complexity, it is of utmost importance that the Prime Minister of India himself recognizes the impact that such a programme can have at the bottom of the pyramid, not only on energy, environment, and human health, but also on poverty eradication, and provides the requisite leadership to transform lives.