All the 10 tribal families at Sindalachiwadi village in Raigad district of Maharashtra are happy that they don’t have to suffer the daily ordeal while preparing meals in their mud huts. With their new biomass, smokeless stoves donated by RAC Panvel Elite, RID 3131, “cooking has become easy and painless for us. Also, the cooking time is reduced by around 40–50 minutes,” says Pallavi (35). Earlier, she recalls, “with mud chullahs we were exposed to ­excessive smoke, suffered from frequent cough and eye irritation.” Also, the chullah had to be fed with firewood from tree branches, thus it resulted in shrinking green cover in their locality.

Over the last eight years, Project Joy of Giving has brought smiles and happiness to at least 10,000 children, issueless aged couples and elderly people through distribution of sparingly used clothes, toys, ­cooking utensils, stationery items, bags, shoes and a range of groceries which were collected from houses across ­Mumbai. Explaining the flagship project of RAC Mumbai Salt City, RID 3141, club president Pranati Chheda says, “We do this project in three phases. A few days before Diwali we reach out to poor children in an institution or charity home and provide them with all useful items including clothes, utensils and crockery which we had collected in a special drive.”