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During the last seven decades, improved cookstoves have not captured the market, despite intensive multifarious efforts in India and elsewhere. More than 70% of the total population of India (900 million) and half the world population (3 billion) use solid biomass in the traditional less-efficient biomass cookstoves to meet their day-to-day energy needs of cooking and heating, leading to air pollution that results in health problems. The improved cookstoves in India and elsewhere have three relevant aspects: (1) reduced emissions related to global warming and climate change; (2) reduced emissions related to human health; and (3) the potential to create much-desired remunerative rural employment. Four principal barriers have been deduced from our analysis for this failure, and lack of their remediation so far has resulted in policy paralysis. These barriers are: distant locations of manufacturers of cookstoves, and testing centers; sustainability of testing centers and present defunct standards for purchases; and a lack of quantitative aspects that puts good and bad cookstoves in the same category. Further, a star rating based on a single weighted score of performance parameters combining test results on thermal efficiency, carbon monoxide (CO) and total particulate matter (TPM) is proposed to guide the objective purchases through tender and direct purchases by end users.