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The rapidly growing global demand for pollutant-free cooking energy has proliferated the research and development of energy efficient and clean cook-stoves. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the gradual improvements in cook-stove designs, focusing on gaseous and liquid fuel-operated cook-stoves around the world. Various literatures concerning the technical aspects such as design and testing, are brought together to provide an insight into the present status of developments in cook-stoves. This review of cook-stove performance covers topics such as stable operating conditions, flame propagation aspects, heat transfer and temperature distribution within the burner, fuel consumption, thermal efficiency, and emissions. Covering both laboratory-scale and field studies, the various cook-stove technologies reported so far are summarized with relevant comments regarding their commercial viabilities. The numerical modeling of combustion in cook-stoves; human health and the environmental impacts of unclean cooking technologies; and various schemes, strategies, and governmental initiatives for the promotion of cleaner cooking practices are also presented, with suggestions for future work.

Groups have their own social realities which determine their perceptions of justice having impact on their well-being and consequent integration with the mainstream society. The objective of the present study was to understand variations in perceived justice in terms of opportunities existing in fi ve different domains, i.e. social prestige, economic, educational, employment and political by the Hindu Majority (N = 100) and Muslim (N = 100) and Christian (N = 76) minorities in India. In addition, the study also aimed to understand the relationship of perceived justice with self-esteem, collective esteem and social exclusion. Male and female participants (N = 276) of the study were either of high or low caste, and were of employed or unemployed status from a north Indian city. The results indicate that justice perception is determined by religion and caste not by gender and employment status. The majority Hindus perceived signifi cantly higher perceptions of justice than Christians and Muslims minorities on all four domains except education.For education the minority Muslim group had lower justice perceptions than Hindus and Christians who did not differ signifi cantly. The three groups differed signifi cantly in their ratings of social exclusion with maximum exclusion perceived by Christians and minimum by Hindus. Results have implications for development initiatives.

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