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There is little in common between US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sindhu, a village belle who lives 14,000 kilometres away in South India. Sindhu is a primary school dropout, who hardly ventures out of her hamlet. She spends most of her time in daily chores such as cooking, washing and keeping the family hog pen with a lone animal. She knows nothing of international power politics or cross-border economic battles.

Yet, both Clinton and Sindhu have become the central characters in a simmering international dispute between American and Indian interests. It is not an explosive, headline-grabbing trade war of sorts, but tacit hostility that is carried out in whispers. At stake is everything from the struggle against climate change and loss of forests to providing a healthier lifestyle to women in the developing world.

And all the fire started from the humble cookstove.

Sindhu belongs to a family of coffee plantation workers, in the village of Balayagudi in the picturesque Coorg district of Karnataka. A five-foot wall divides her one-room hut into kitchen and living area. Till recently, she used to shed copious tears as she cooked for a family of seven with a stove that burnt wood quite inefficiently and filled up her house with smoke. One day, BAIF Development Research Foundation (a voluntary organisation founded by Manibhai Desai, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi) gave her a stove that burnt wood more efficiently and led to less smoke, tears and carbon black.

Sindhu is just one of the few million lucky women to have escaped from the wretchedness of the slow-burning, smoky stove. For many more millions, almost all of them women, the traditional wood stove called chulha is the only option to cook. You must blow to get the wood to burn enough and wait interminably as the heat slowly spreads through the vessel. Even then, less than a fifth of the wood converts into heat energy, the rest becoming smoke and soot. But you sit alongside, stirring the pot, mixing the vegetables and choking your lungs in the process. Do it for years and you could get a number of serious diseases including cancer.

There are about 160 million households across India where this is a daily occurrence. As many as 570,000 women and children die prematurely each year due to chulha smoke, a joint study by University of California, Berkeley, and Indian Institutes of Technology has revealed. These families are too poor to afford cooking gas connections, despite the government’s subsidy. They depend on wood for fuel, as it is locally available and they can’t buy anything else.

The government realised the enormity of this problem as early as 1985, when it launched a scheme to provide low-smoke stoves to poor families. In the following 17 years, the government distributed stoves free to 30 million households. But then, being a freebie offer, it was a very expensive undertaking for the government. The technology wasn’t good either and the stoves were found to be offering “low durability, usage and performance.” As a result, the scheme was wound up in 2002. Even as more and more Indians bought LPG stoves (there are 122 million gas connections in the country now), a substantial part of the country still depended on chulhas for which the government needed to evolve a separate solution. But it was clear that it had to be viable and market-based.

Two years ago, the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) launched the National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative (NBCI) to explore public-private partnership to take cleaner stoves to those millions. The government wanted to work with those who can help it scale up the project to the gigantic levels India needs. It also needed a lot of money.

It was then that a global alliance that Hillary Clinton helped to launch came into the picture.