[Stoves] Stove costs

[Anand Karve]

Dear Jan,
In the part of India where I live, a person earning US$ 2 per day
would not be considered all that poor. He would not be able to support
a family on that earning but if he were leading a bachelor's life in a
village, he can live comfortably on that money. The field assistants
in our own institute earn a salary of about US$60 per month. They are
farmers' sons. So they have a roof on their heads and get enough to
eat. The salary that they earn is spent on flashy clothing, cinema, a
mobile phone etc.  It is the exchange rate between the Indian Rupee
and the US$ that makes us so poor in the eyes of the world. I myself,
who headed the Institute till my retirement last month, earned a
monthly salary of only US$350, and yet I belonged to the richest 3% of
the country (that is the percentage of people who pay income tax).
Yours
A.D.Karve

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 1:40 AM, Jan Bianchi <janbianchi at comcast.net> wrote:
> Dear A.D.
>
> The questions about what the reference to $2 a day earning capacity really
> means is totally fair.
>
> But if you were asking the question I was asking, what can people who are
> poor in a country that may itself be poor, or at least parts of it, afford
> to pay for a stove, I'm curious how you would describe them?
>
> So far the answers that I have seen that suggest they can save no more than
> 20% of their daily income for about 10 days seems grounded in research.
>
>
> Jan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org
> [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Anand Karve
> Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 8:04 PM
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Stove costs
>
> Dear Jan,
> I keep hearing about the people earning less than US$2 per day. In a
> lot of cases the income is shown to be low in statistics generated by
> the Government of that particular country. Even a landless labourer in
> a village in India would have some hens and a goat (or ducks and a
> pig), the income from which never enters the Government statistics.
> Another fact of life is that people's priorities differ from ours.
> Some of us feel that the poor should have a clean latrine and a clean
> kitchen, but the poor themselves often consider a cellphones in their
> pocket and a t.v. in the house to be more important. Also the rate of
> conversion of a dollar into the local currency is often manipulated by
> the Government. 2 Dollars in a poor country has a relatively high
> buying power in that country than in the US.
> Yours
> A.D.Karve
>
> On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Jan Bianchi <janbianchi at comcast.net> wrote:
>> Do any of you know of a list that compares different clean burning cook
>> stoves not only by fuel type, efficiency and emissions, but also by price
>> and the presence or lack thereof of subsidy?  I don’t see the latter
>> information on most websites that describe different stoves.
>>
>>
>>
>> If there isn’t such a list, maybe we could work to put together one by
> each
>> of you sending a link that describes a stove and stating the price they
> are
>> currently being sold for in local communities, together with whether there
>> is a subsidy and if so the amount?  I’d be happy to work with Erin to put
>> together such a list from your answers.
>>
>>
>>
>> For people living on $2 a day or less, what for example would be
> considered
>> a low cost stove?  Middling?  High?
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> ***
> Dr. A.D. Karve
> Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)
>
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>
>
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>



-- 
***
Dr. A.D. Karve
Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)