Jyothi Ravishankar of Mangalore, who believed traditional wood stoves were wasting far too much fuel, has developed a design of a stove which is fuel efficient.

Now, Jyothi – a law student and a mother of two, is planning to set up a workshop to make it a marketable proposition.

The idea of the stove struck Jyothi while watching her mother cook one day.

She noticed that traditional stoves - especially ones that use wood as fuel - are time consuming and therefore end up using more wood.

"Since my childhood days, I felt that a lot of wood was wasted in our traditional way of cooking. I also felt that using a stove was very time consuming," said the innovator.

"To reduce this wastage, I thought of this idea and then designed the stove," she said.

Jyothi's energy saving stove uses the heat radiated in a stove to heat water and cook - both at the same time.

New design

The arrangement consists of a stainless steel enclosure that surrounds three sides of a wood fired stove.

In this stove there is an inlet pipe through which the cold water comes in from the bottom and gets heated and passes out from the outlet pipe to go and fill the stainless steel container.

This device works on the principle that cold water flows down and hot water rises up and cooks the food placed on the top of the stove.

The entire unit is portable and can be set up anywhere.

In 2005, Jyothi won the National innovation Foundation's "Best innovation award.

She has also managed to sell a few pieces to local villagers and neighbours. Jyothi claims that her stove can heat upto 70 litres of water in about one hour.

The total cost of the apparatus is about Rs 2000. But there is much more that the Ravishankars want to do.

To begin with they want financial and technical help from the government to set up a workshop and further this project.

Here is hoping that Jyothi continues to put her education to good use and continues to innovate and experiment.