Amid rising temperatures, will India embrace solar cooking once again?
As temperatures in India continue to rise, the idea of solar cooking is gaining renewed interest. Historically, solar cooking has been explored as a sustainable alternative, with early experiments by scientists and notable figures like Dr. Rajendra Prasad and Manindra Kumar Ghosh. Despite initial enthusiasm, the technology faced setbacks due to inefficiency and lack of user consultation.
In India , where temperatures have gone beyond insane heights, a soldier in Rajasthan cooked papads in the searing hot sand.
#Elections with ET Lok Sabha Exit Poll Results 2024: Track all updates here Papads are easy to make with alternative heat sources.
A friend recalls how in hostels, a hot clothes iron was pressed over papads, ideally placed between two pieces of cloth.
While studying in London, Dr Ambedkar sustained his late-night reading sessions with papads roasted on his room heater.
Solar cooking seems to make the most sense.
It has always seemed only fitting that, as India suffers so much from the Sun ’s heat, it could also be put to practical use in cooking.
Sun-drying foods is a kind of cooking, but the hope has always been to create a device to intensify the heat.
In 1767, Swiss scientist Horace de Saussure trapped heat in a glass-topped insulated box. Hauling it over Swiss mountains, he achieved temperatures of 110º C, enough to cook fruit.
He established that altitude and ambient tempera ture didn’t matter as much as direct exposure to sunlight.
The next major development was in 1870 when William Adams came to Bombay as deputy registrar of the High Court.
His real interest was not law, but inventions, and living in a sunny climate made him obsessed with solar power . Adams created a cone-shaped arrangement of polished metal plates that focussed heat on a cooking box. It was used to bake a Christmas cake and simple meals, and Adams suggested coolies carry it on their heads, to soak up the sun and cook while they marched.
Adams published an essay ‘Solar Heat: a Substitute for Fuel in Tropical Countries’ where he argued solar cooking would save India from cutting forests for firewood.
Sadly, this was generally ignored, but Indian interest in solar cooking remained.
In 1945, while in jail in Bihar, Dr Rajendra Prasad encountered a solar cooker designed by Manindra Kumar Ghosh, a Gandhian scientist . Richard Gregg, a notable American Gandhian, also wrote about the potential for solar power, which he extolled as the kind of grassroots technology the world really needed.
After Independence when Dr Prasad became President, he presented Ghosh’s cooker to the newly established National Physical Laboratory (NPL), which soon announced it had made a model for mass use. In March 1952, the Times of India reported that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had eaten a meal of “sun-cooked cabbage and vegetables turned out by the cooker”. NPL proudly hyped its solar cooker not just in India, but across the world.
Duly impressed, in 1953, UNESCO asked the Indian government to host the first international conference on solar power and wind energy.
Indian manufacturers like Tata were said to be planning to mass produce NPL’s solar cooker.
But all too soon, the hype fizzled out. NPL never consulted the rural women who were projected as its main users, and in real life, they found the cooker too cumbersome and inefficient.
In Midnight’s Machines, Arun Mohan Sukumar’s history of technology in modern India, he excoriates NPL’s poor planning and politicised promotion of the cooker for significantly setting back India’s technology development.
In historian Elizabeth Chatterjee’s essay ‘The poor woman’s energy’ (2023), she points to how solar cookers were always seen as “a substitute for firewood and dung rather than the abundant and flexible energy of fossil fuels and grid energy”. On a two-track energy model, solar was the lesser one. Rural households preferred to continue with the fuels they were familiar with, or aspired to the gas stoves urban households enjoyed.
Yet, in a world where the Sun’s power is only increasing, the promise of solar cooking remains.
Devices like electric coils or induction cookers powered by solar batteries are increasingly available and require less of a shift in cooking styles.
As those papads roasted in Rajasthan’s sands show, India might yet switch on to solar cooking someday.
