12 million people have no cooking arrangements in India, says study

Around 12 million people in India have no proper cooking arrangements. The situation is worse in urban India where around seven per cent of households lack cooking arrangements while in rural India over one per cent of households is deprived of the facility.

The facts were revealed by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report based on the 68th round of survey. Maharashtra (3.8 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (2.7 per cent) are the top two states which reported “no cooking arrangement”, the survey says.

According to the report, the situation has worsened over the years. It says that 0.7 per cent of rural households lacked any cooking facility in 1993-94 which touched 1.3 per cent in 2012.

Similar is the situation in urban India where 6.3 per cent households did not have cooking arrangements around 20 years ago, but now the figure has reached 6.9 per cent.

The report says, “The proportion of rural households having no cooking arrangement shows a steady increase from 0.7 per cent in 1993-94 to 1.6 percent in 2009-10, but it marginally decreased after that. In this respect, there is no clear trend in urban areas, but the phenomenon of no cooking arrangement is seen to be considerably high.”

In urban areas, the highest proportion of households lacking cooking facility were seen in Karnataka (13.9 per cent), Tamil Nadu (9.2 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (9.1 per cent), according to the report.

Urban-rural divide

The report highlights that the most common cooking fuel used in urban areas is liquified petroleum gas (68 per cent) while in rural India most households are dependent on firewood.

Chhattisgarh tops the list with 93.2 per cent of households using firewood for cooking. It is followed by Rajasthan (89.3 per cent) and Odisha (87.0 per cent).

At the all-India level, firewood is followed by LPG which is used by 15.0 per cent of households. Around 9.6 per cent and 1.1 per cent of rural households use dung cake and coke and coal respectively as primary sources of cooking. Around 4.9 per cent of households use other sources such as gobar gas, charcoal and electricity for cooking.

Major points in study

Use of coke and coal as the primary source of energy for cooking has been markedly reported in Jharkhand (31.1 per cent), West Bengal (13.5 per cent) and Chhattisgarh (11.3 per cent)

Nearly 40 per cent of urban households use LPG as the principal fuel for cooking in all major states. It is the highest in Haryana (86.5 per cent households), followed by Andhra Pradesh (77.3 per cent) and Punjab (75.4 per cent). It is the lowest in Chhattisgarh (39.8 per cent).

Compared to rural areas, use of kerosene as the primary source of energy for cooking is more prevalent in urban areas, especially in Gujarat (10.5 per cent), Maharashtra (10.1 per cent) and Punjab (10.0 per cent).

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

The Car Credo

Vol - L No. 31, August 01, 2015 

• Editorials

A car-friendly city is a danger to democracy.

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Parliament Deadlocked

Vol - L No. 31, August 01, 2015 

• Editorials

Obstructionist tactics are becoming tiresome and the Opposition may be tiring too.

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Brainier than Einstein? 12-yr-old gets highest IQ score of 162

A 12-year-old girl in the UK has achieved the highest possible score of 162 on a Mensa IQ test, which could make her brainier than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Nicole Barr, of Harlow, Essex, got a perfect 162 on the Mensa test. The score puts the tween in the top 1% of brightest people in the world and means she is more intelligent than physicist Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Einstein, who are all thought to have an IQ of 160.

“She’s a hard working child. She stays after school for homework club and never misses a day,” said her mother Dolly Buckland, 34.

“From a young age she’s been picking out mistakes in books and magazines. She’s a happy, fun-loving girl who is always asking for extra homework,” she was quoted as saying by ‘mirror.co.uk’.

“When I found out I got such a high score, it was so  unexpected. I was shocked,” said Nicole who received her IQ test results last week. “Nicole’s IQ puts her comfortably within the top 1% of the population,” said Mensa spokesman Ann Clarkson.

The girl, who is a Year 7 student in Burnt Mill Academy, enjoys reading, singing and drama. At primary school, Nicole was several years ahead of her peers and could tackle complex algebra before the age of 10.

the speaking tree - When The Mind Is In The Present Moment

Swami Chinmayananda





When the mind drops its perceptions of sense objects and stops identification with its thought dances, at that stage in meditation, the mind is no-mind. When thoughts rush out in their mad fury to hug objects of pleasure, they are called extrovert thoughts, and to quiet these is the sacred function of the path of meditation. When these outgoing thoughts are eliminated, the resulting condition of the mind is known as the no-thought state of highest mediation.Thoughts gush in to flood the mind with angry bursts of self-riotous compulsions mainly from two sources: the past and the future. Some thoughts stem from the past, dragging along with them memories of the good and bad done in the days gone by . These confuse the individual with regrets and sorrows, joys and pleasures raised by his memory from the stinking tombs of the past, forcing him to relive the dead past in the fragrant moments of the present.
The future is the other source of our thoughts. We are often flown upon the wings of our mind's fancy and imagination to a world of dreams ­ where we are made to shudder at the future possibilities of failure, tremble in hopes of successes, and swoon in the expectation of total losses or large profits.
The past is made up of dead moments and to unearth the buried moments is to live with the dead. We do so when we waste our energies in unproductive and wasteful regrets over things we have already committed. The more we remember them those very vasanas are getting more deeply fixed into our personality structure. When we are not engaging ourselves with the negative preoccupation of entertaining the regrets of the past, we are wandering in the fairy castles of our fancied future, peopled with ugly fears, horrid dreams, unnerving hopes, and perhaps a thousand impossible expectations.
In short, when our minds are not rattled by the perception of objects, let us not thereby conclude that we have quieted our thoughts. Often, it is not so. The mind, when it is not engaged in the worldly objects that are right in front of it, can choose its own private fields of agitation by dragging up the buried corpses of a diseased past or by bringing up vivid pictures of a tragic hopelessness as the sure possibility of the immediate future! In either case the mind of the individual at meditation can get sadly disturbed.
Therefore, the rishis advise us: “Moment to moment engage the outgoing mind to live in the present. Completely reject the past. Renounce the future totally . Then, in such a bosom, the agitated mind shall reach the state of mindlessness.“ This state of mind is called no-mind.
The content of the present moment, divorced from all relationships with the past and future, is the absolute fullness of the Infinite. Eternity is experienced at the sacred depth of the present moment. To live in the present, independent of the past and the future, is to experience samadhi, the revealing culmination of meditation. Seek it yourself. Nobody can give it to anyone else. Each will have to reach there all by himself, in himself, with no other vehicle than himself. (August 3 is Sadhana Day . Swami Chinmayananda, founder of Chinmaya Mission, took mahasamadhi on this day in 1993.)

What made Kalam great: In the words of his classmate Sujatha

APJ Abdul Kalam was my classmate in the BSc course at Trichy’s St Joseph’s College. During lunch breaks in the big assembly hall, we used to banter until the bell rang for the lectures. I remember him from those times. He would not talk much then, and if someone poked fun, he would gently laugh it off. And he would not come with the rest of us to watch movies.

After our BSc,, when I joined the Madras Institute of Technology to study electronics, I saw him join the aeronautics course in the same year. We both shared a common passion for Tamil and I recall our frequent meetings on that count. I recall his interest in the songs of Subramania Bharathi (nationalist poet) and Tirukkural (Tirvalluvar’s omnibus of couplets). Right at that stage, it was clear that he wanted to accomplish something practical in the field of aeronautics or rocket science. Our professors (one German, one Indian) showed the way – and I think it was the first time in India. They made an engineless-glider and took it to the Meenambakkam airport – part by part – and put it all together again.  Then they used a winch to pull it and hoisted it like a kite in the sky. It caught the hot winds and soared. And so did our feelings in the college. Kalam played a role in that.

Professor Raghavachari, who taught us physics, was passionate about Tamil. He held a competition that invited essays in Tamil on science. Kalam and I took part, of course. Kalam’s essay was titled “We will build a plane”. Mine was on Infinity Mathematics, titled “Anantham.” He got the prize.

Kalam did not stop with his writing. Forget the plane. He built a rocket!

I lost touch with him for a few years after our MIT days. In the interval, he grew up under the supervision of figures such as Vikram Sarabhai, training in NASA. After I joined Bharat Electronics Ltd, I found opportunity to meet him on many counts for official work. He was a part of ISRO’s SLV rocket project. I could now see strong signs of hard work. There were people saying right then that he was destined to climb the ladder in the government hierarchy. Later, he moved to become the head of the DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) at Hyderabad in the Department of Space. He successfully accomplished a series of missile projects: Prithvi, Agni, Akash, Nag et al. Then he became advisor to the prime minister and played a significant role in the stalled light commercial aircraft (LCA) project, pulling it finally out of the hangar and actually making it fly.

If I were to look back and compare ourselves with our batch mate, Kalam’s rise is manifold. None of us quite rose to become a Bharat Ratna. The main reason for his success was his dedication towards work, tireless labour and self-confidence.

When he was in the DRDO, I have taken part in his review meetings – and they were brief. He would ask a project head if a certain task was done. If it was delayed he never got upset. No shouting – but somehow he would make the person responsible for missing the deadline squirm in discomfort. When he was working 24/7/365, others were compelled to match up. He led by example.

His personal needs were few. He was a bachelor and a vegetarian with no “bad” habits. To top this he had a devout Muslim’s sense of good conduct. These kept him away from the temptations of a big office. In all of Tehelka’s tapes that exposed doings inside the government, he came out as a figure who stood in the way of corruption in high places.

I particularly recall one incident. When I went to Hyderabad for a meeting with him, some Russian technicians were visiting and there was a dinner at the Taj Banjara. I was invited as well. The Russians were gloating in the joy of having signed an agreement and forced a glass of vodka on Kalam, who avoided any intoxicant. He approached me quickly  and asked in an embarrassed tone, “What’s that in your hand?”.

“Water. Ice water, Kalam,” I replied.

“Give it to me,” he said.

In a flash he had taken my glass and thrust the vodka glass into my unsuspecting hands.

“Those guys simply don’t understand that I don’t drink,” he said.

In a while I heard them say “Cheers” – and a glass of ice water went up with the vodkas!

Kalam and I plan to write a book together. He said we could do one on India’s rocket science since the times of Tipu Sultan. “I am ready, Kalam. Are you?” I would ask him. “I am almost ready. Let us start next month,” he would say – everytime.

Now that he has retired, I expect him to write it – if only the Indian government, US universities, colleges, Lions and Rotary clubs, schools and social organizations would leave him alone!