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.

Presently, more than 80 crore Indians depend on the usage of biomass fuels for their cooking needs, of which a disproportionately high number comprise 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

Award Remuneration
10 shortlisted applicants to receive INR 5 lakhs each and incubation/mentorship support for development of Minimal Viable Prototypes (MVP) in 3 months.
5 finalists to receive additional INR 10 lakhs each and incubation/mentorship support for product development, design & fabrication to deliver final products in 3.5 months.
2 winners of the theme selected after the 3 months of user acceptance field trials to receive INR 50 lakhs each and a continued incubation support (if required) for ensuring effective after sales of the product post the deployment.