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Ensuring affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030 is part of the internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDG7). With roughly 3 billion people still lacking access to clean cooking solutions in 2017, this remains an ambitious task. The use of solid biomass such as wood and cow dung for cooking causes household air pollution resulting in severe health hazards. In this context, the Indian government has set up a large program promoting the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in rural areas. While this has led millions of households to adopt LPG, a major fraction of them continues to rely heavily on solid biomass for their daily cooking. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of simple health messaging on the propensity of these households to use LPG more regularly. Our results from rural Rajasthan are encouraging. They show that health messaging increases the reported willingness to pay for LPG, and substantially increases actual consumption. We measure this based on a voucher, which can only be used if LPG consumption is doubled until a certain deadline. Households exposed to health messaging use the voucher about 30% more often than households exposed to a placebo treatment. We further show that the impact of our very brief, but concrete health messaging is close to the effect of a 10% price reduction for a new LPG cylinder. Finally, our study raises some interesting questions about gender-related effects that would be worth consideration in future research.

Worldwide, about 2.9 billion people cook and heat using open fires and simple stoves burning solid biomass like wood, dung or agricultural residues. The inefficient combustion process causes high emissions of aerosols and gaseous pollutants evoking serious adverse impacts on human health and the environment. To mitigate these health risks and the associated detrimental climate active emissions, multiple initiatives have promoted the use of cleaner cooking technologies and fuels. In this context, the Indian government currently promotes the use of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). A large-scale program essentially covering the upfront costs of the new technology has increased the number of households with LPG stoves by more than 70 million since 2016. However, even after adopting LPG, a major fraction of the rural population continues to rely on solid biomass as their primary cooking fuel. One reason for the limited use of LPG could be that the health effects of traditional cooking are not sufficiently known to the households. We examine this hypothesis through an experiment providing randomized health information to 550 respondents with low LPG consumption in rural Rajasthan. Our results indicate that health information significantly increases the reported willingness to pay for LPG and has a strong positive impact on consumption behavior. We show that the causal mechanism indeed works via improved health knowledge, which is significantly higher among households receiving the health information. We also find suggestive evidence that knowledge-building regarding the health effects of cooking fuels should not target women alone.