Every winter, tens of thousands of Indian Army soldiers are stationed at altitudes where temperatures drop well below freezing, and the nearest fuel supply line is days away. With around 50,000 troops deployed at high altitude through the harshest months, keeping them warm has never been a single problem with a single fix — it's been a stack of solutions, each solving part of the cold and leaving the rest.

For years, the most reliable answer was kerosene, burnt inside cloth tents or iron container cabins. It worked, but it was expensive, polluting and, as innovator and educator Sonam Wangchuk would later discover, dangerous. His solar-heated tent is the newest entry in this line of solutions — but to understand why it matters, it helps to see everything the army was already doing to hold off the cold.

In 2021, he spoke to The Better India's Rinchen Norbu Wangchuk about how he built it.

The first line of defence was never the shelter — it was the soldier. The force imported Extreme Cold Weather Clothing capable of keeping a body warm to minus 50 degrees, though it came at a cost of roughly Rs 800 crore a year and was often bulky. Battery-heated gloves and insoles tried to close the gaps electrically.

But none of it warmed the tent that body slept in once the shift ended. Clothing kept a moving soldier alive; it did nothing for the sealed shelter waiting at the end of the day. That left the shelter to fuel — and fuel meant risk: burns, breathing trouble, and carbon monoxide with nowhere to go once a tent was sealed for the night.

A safer stove: DRDO's Him Tapak

The traditional answer to a cold room in Ladakh and Kashmir has long been the Bukhari — a metal drum or cylindrical stove burning wood, coal or kerosene, venting smoke through a flue pipe in the roof. Simple to build and easy to fuel locally, it heated homes across the region for generations. But it was never........

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