This was one of the most overwhelming experience for smokeless cookstove revolution team. Done in partnership with grass roots NGO Khushi Hona, we got an in-depth background about the situation facing the communities in this geography. Issues like unemployment, lack of community organization, malnourishment being rampant especially among children, extreme poverty and as a result, extreme hunger. We felt that villagers require a lot of support and handholding at every stage. We were further apprised to issues like no or limited access to water; social evils (mainly alcohol); very limited hygiene awareness; severe health issues including T.B and domestic violence. We interacted with the communities across 5 villages in five days and reached out to over 250 villagers. These included village Nai Duniya in Akbarpur panchayaat, village Bhoti and village Hadah in Goiyakhurd Panchayaat falling under district Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh. Also villages of Lokhariha and Valua in Pindra Panchayaat, Satna District which comes under Madhya Pradesh. Open cook stoves and its related issues are a huge menace in this region due to very fast depleting forest cover and minimal presence of LPG. And hence, the people really appreciated our idea of a zero cost and highly efficient cook stove. However, unfortunately our ground partner NGO was not able to sustain the follow up work due to lack of resources at their end. We do believe that this area needs strong interventions at various level and SCF team would like to revisit this area but with a stronger ground level partner

You can read more about our experience in BUNDELKHAND  in our blog section

Rhea’s blog – http://rheagupte.com/trials-and-pursuits/