Smokeless Cookstove Foundation

About us

SCF is a 100% non-profit venture Licenced under section 8 (1) of the Companies Act, 2013, and initiated by Himalayan Rocket Stove Pvt. Ltd, a social enterprise.

SCR is a training and awareness programme designed to teach rural communities across India in making efficient chulahs at virtually no costs. Rocket stoves, when designed well, burn cleanly and emit little in the way of noxious fumes. Using far less fuel than a traditional chulha and being much less polluting with the wood they do burn, a Smokeless Chulha is a breath of fresh air for the choked homes and hearths of the nearly these 3 billion people still using traditional cooking methods around the world.

The idea started when Australian inventor Russell Collins was experimenting with clay as a material for his stoves in Ladakh. He was working on a social enterprise called Himalayan Rocket Stove in the mountains when he realized that he couldn’t get the high-tech materials he needed to make his stoves work.

After searching for a local solution, he came up with a way of using clay that changed its nature from being heat absorbing to heat repelling. This made it possible to make clay tubes for his commercial stoves, and in the process, came to realise that he had stumbled on a simple and incredibly affordable way to make smokeless chulhas (cookstoves) using well established ‘rocket stove’ technology. He decided to initiate a not-for-profit project along with Nitisha Agrawal who manages the operations for the NGO ‘Smokeless Cookstove Foundation’.