BIRAC-SoCH is an Innovation Challenge Award envisioned to offer a unique platform to Start-ups/Entrepreneurs working in the community health sector. The focus of the Challenge is to facilitate a promising technology idea that can be translated into an efficient technology which addresses the issues of community health in a defined time limit.

At present, more than 80 crore Indians depend on the usage of biomass fuels for their cooking needs, of which a disproportionately high number comprise of rural households. Most prevalent cooking practices in the rural and community settings include indoor cooking, with poor ventilation, on inefficient-basic mud/stone stoves, often characterized by the use of air blowers for better flame, making every day cooking a very hazardous affair for health and environment alike. Severe, continued exposure to indoor/household air pollution is known to cause 1 million premature deaths in India every year, where over 66,000 are those of children under the age of 5.

Alternate options for moving to cleaner cooking solutions include switching to cleaner biomass based cook stoves, induction-based systems, LPG, solar based cooking and biogas-based cooking. However, each of these cooking solutions has their own limitations and face challenges in adoption and scale up, thus the clean cooking sector needs much focus and efforts in promoting the adoption of the clean cooking solutions.

It is towards realizing this end that BIRAC has intended to launch SoCH Award to facilitate Indian innovators to offer solutions for clean cooking based challenges having national
and global relevance.

Theme for SoCH 2020-2021: Innovative, Efficient and Affordable Solutions for Clean Cooking in Rural and Community Settings

Last date for submission of Forms: June 15, 2020
Evaluation and short listing of EoIs: July, 2020
Detailed applications invited from selected EoIs: Aug 2020
Selection of top 10 solutions through evaluation of detailed applications: September 2020
10 shortlisted applicants will receive Rs 5 Lakh each and incubation/mentorship support to deliver prototypes in 3 months: December 2020
Selection of top 5 Finalists/solutions through detailed Technical (lab) and controlled field testing of the products: February 2021
5 Finalists to receive Rs10 lakh each and incubation /mentorship support for product development, design & fabrication to deliver final products in 3.5 months: May 2021

Detailed and participatory user acceptance trials to be conducted in the field for three months: August 2021
Announcement of 2 winners of the theme to receive Rs 50 lakh each: September 2021

BIRAC’s SoCH Award is aimed at rewarding innovative clean cooking solutions.