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The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of rural energy transition in cooking options in India. Although India is aiming to achieve a double-digit economic growth, a large share of rural households still rely on firewood for cooking which not only has serious repercussions of increasing indoor pollution but also has a concomitant adverse effect on women and child morbidity and mortality. However, transition to clean energy options like improved cookstoves for these households may not be necessarily linear. It is often driven or resisted by latent factors such as caste, trust, social capital, information flow, social positioning of clusters that are deeply embedded in the social and cultural norms and values specific to local rural contexts. This has been shown in the present case study that pertains to eight villages in the remote and deprived Purnea district of Bihar and the need for internalizing them in the macro energy policymaking has been established in the paper.

The paper applies a macro foundation research that is complemented by micro foundation tools of fuzzy cognitive mapping-based mental model framework to achieve the purpose of the study. Focused-group discussions and interviews are also conducted to establish the narrative of the paper.

Caste, socio-political position, asset structure, remoteness, culture and technology access affect rural households’ decision making capability that is related to shifting from using the traditionalmeans of firewood and biomass based traditional cookstoves for cooking to adopting improved clean cooking stoves which will enable the transition toward the use of clean rural energy in the eight villages in Bihar chosen for this study.

The findings of the paper have larger implications for the broader macro energy policymaking in the country by taking into account the non-linear, latent factors of village contexts.

The research will help energy policymakers in decision-making and will guide the implementation process of national- and state-level policies on rural energy transition in India.

The findings of the paper will help the smoother implementation of national- and state-level rural energy transition policies for cooking, creating developmental dividends for rural Indian households.

The research is new with regard to the application of non-deterministic fuzzy cognitive mapping-based mental model approach to contribute to the country’s national- and state-level rural energy transition policies.

This paper analyzed country-wise energy consumption, sources of emissions, and how it gets impacted by their socioeconomic development and provides a framework for integrated climate and development policy.

An analysis of energy supply, consumption and emissions across developed and developing economies using long-term empirical data.

The framework provided areas to be focused on reducing emissions during the economic and social development trajectory of nations.

It provides a holistic and integrated picture of the context of emissions that induced global warming and developmental challenges for different types of countries.

All nations must reduce fossil fuel consumption to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to keep the planet's temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the preindustrial period.

Sustainable/green technologies might need upfront investment to implement sustainable technologies.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a long-term integrated perspective on energy demand and supply, emissions, and a framework for the formulation of an integrated climate and development policy.

The purpose of the paper is to evaluate print and electronic resources of TERI’s Library and Information Centre (LIC) with an aim to maximize the net marginal benefits and minimize net marginal costs, without compromising the quality of the library resources.

The parameters considered for analyzing the value of the library resources for this exercise were resource access costs, strategic value of the resource based on subject area coverage, frequency of use, citations, direct and indirect benefits to users. The data regarding these parameters were provided from wide range of sources (both tangible and intangible), to come out with the qualitative and quantitative assessment through an optimization and simulation based model.

Out of the total holdings in TERI LIC that were analyzed, 85 percent of book collections and 63.5 percent of journals were found to be useful for the researchers. The least-used books and journals were identified for weeding to optimize the value of library for users and make space for new and topical library collections.

A sample of data sources out of the total library collections was defined for the evaluation.

The paper demonstrates the value of library resources that is of critical importance to libraries for an effective and efficient delivery of services for generating future knowledge. Evaluating the value of libraries resources has implications both for librarians as well as library users.

The evaluation exercise established the efficacy of the TERI library holdings for research and academic purposes in the domain of sustainable development. The library collection was found to be cost effective and beneficial to meet the future demand from the user community.