eco stove

24.05.2017 praktidesign.com

These eco stoves are  made at our Chennai and Puducherry factories. They are tested for emissions and durability at our Puducherry lab. We don’t want users to change their cooking style, so our designers work with women to understand what they cook and how they cook. We’ve employed a full-time ‘testing’ cook from a nearby village, who test our stoves each day. If our stove doesn’t work well, we don’t have lunch, and we have an upset cook!

What’s new about Prakti Ray?

It’s the latest in our single burner wood stove design series and much lighter than our other variants. With Ray, we made a significant improvement in usability, allowing fuel and smoke reduction. While most stoves have small doors, our models have larger outlets. To be priced at ₹999, it will be the cheapest in the market and we are aiming for a pre-Diwali release.

How do you work out the pricing?

While social enterprises are an excellent way to create a sustainable, scalable impact, the support and funding available is inadequate. We are competing against the traditional chullah, which costs nothing. So we source material and staff locally and buy in bulk, which helps reduce overall pricing by over 30%. The single burner stoves are priced at ₹1,499 and our institutional ones at ₹4,500. But they are subsidised for rural markets and prices go as low as ₹800 (for a bulk order).

Your work towards promoting healthy cooking in rural households is popular.

Our products are aimed at the poor, but we treat them as any other paying customer. Creating innovative methods to interact with them are important, and our online Prakti Cooking Show is one such tool. Our focus is on promoting healthy, local ingredients and we bring in foreigners who speak Tamil to teach villagers how they can tweak international recipes with locally-available produce. For instance, a video of our French colleague from Auroville cooking a Thai green curry, was a big hit. They have also learnt how to cook their own version of the banana flambée using jaggery and ghee.