Cooking habits seem to have changed dramatically over the past decade in Tamil Nadu with nearly half the households switching from traditional fuel sources to LPG/PNG, according to figures released for the ‘Houselisting and Housing Census'.
On the flip side, still 13.7 per cent of homes do not have a kitchen at all while 0.4 per cent of households ticked the “no cooking” box.
Among the 1.84 crore households surveyed, 47.9 per cent use LPG/PNG as their main mode of cooking, representing a jump of 29 percentage points from 2001.
While 68.7 per cent of the urban population and 28.6 per cent of rural population use this fuel as cooking medium, the use of kerosene is petering out in the State.
Among all fuel forms, kerosene, along with coal/charcoal have the least number of takers — 6.9% and 0.1% of the population. Surprisingly, the use of kerosene is 11 per cent in urban settings while it is only 2.5 per cent in rural areas. Firewood continues to be the mainstay in rural kitchens accounting for nearly 66.8 per cent of the rural households surveyed as against 18.4 per cent of urban homes.
Though the census reveals that 80 per cent of the population use tap water, only 66.3 per cent in urban and 46.1 per cent in rural areas have access to water from treated source and hardly 35 per cent of households have a water source within their residential premises.
The top two districts in terms of households with access to tap water are Theni (93.96 per cent) and Coimbatore (93.76 per cent), while Ramanathapuram (58.01 per cent) and Dharmapuri (55.71 per cent) are at the bottom of the pile.
The urban-rural gap has visibly shrunk in the number of households that use electricity as the main source of lighting. Almost 93 per cent of households use electricity marking an increase of 16 percentage points over the previous census. The urban-rural gap has also narrowed by 11 percentage points. On the personal transport front, 45 per cent of households have bicycles, 32 per cent two-wheelers (a 16 percentage point increase over previous census) and 4 per cent four-wheelers (2 percentage point rise from 2001).
