Sponsor eco-friendly stoves for families in villages

Technology Informatics Design Endeavour (TIDE) works largely in the area of energy access and biomass-based stoves for cooking and other small rural informal industry applications.

TIDE runs a 'Sarala, stove construction training and donation program to families that use inefficient wood-burning stoves. The program benefits rural people in two ways - by providing income generation for local stove builders who are taught the stove construction and the villages by providing the stoves.

The Sarala stove is a two-pan wood or biomass burning stove and costs less than Rs 1000. It saves about 2 kgs of wood from being cut down every day. Each stove reduces CO2 emissions to the tune of about 1 MT annually. TIDE has worked through different enterprise models depending on the product type, the community for whom stove access has to be enabled, the informal industry cluster and likely income generation.

TIDE has also pioneered a Smokeless village concept where about 80% of the village homes shift to smokeless Sarala stoves.

TIDE (Technology Informatics Design Endeavour) was founded in 1993. They work around the themes of Energy Efficiency and Energy Conservation, Women and Livelihood, Cook Stoves and Water and Environment.

They have worked on over 250 projects around these themes experimenting with over 30 technologies and products with funders, resource partners, and communities. TIDE strives to improve lives and the environment, to create opportunities for the underserved, to be a change agent, create more change agents from grass root, and to demonstrate that technology can be an enabler.

Their endeavors have resulted in an annual saving of about 30,000 tons of firewood and about 45,000 tons of CO2 emissions. The TIDE entrepreneurs have had a total turnover of more than 7 crores and earned profits of about 1 crore.

TIDE's methodology has been profiled as Best Practices by UNDP in the area of Energy access to poor. Through Sustaintech, more than 3000 commercial cook stoves have been sold resulting in better indoor quality for about 45000 cooks and in mitigating about 40,000 MTs of CO2 cumulatively.