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• Help in attaining enhances absorption due to multiple reflections as well as concentrating effect within the enclosure. • Reduces the absorption on the side wall temperature and hence, the resultant temperature and the side losses (reduction in both conductive as well radiative heat loss). • A lower heat capacity of the cooking interior due to reduced absorbing surface area which generally do not participate in heat transfer to load but act as surface that loses heat to ambient. • Selection of a TPP that could reflect minimal change- cooker opto-thermal ratio (COR) • Detailed discussion of additionality achieved in terms of performance, economy and carbon saving (environmental aspect) post-retrofit in Indian SBC • Introduced carbon mitigation potential as an objective parameter derived from cooker opto-thermal ratio (COR) Design intervention for improvement in the performance of a solar cooker is required for its mass adoption and popularization. It has remained stagnant for decades for want of a holistic tool which provides metric for prediction of its cumulative optical and thermal(opto-thermal) performance, cooking type/objectives, techno-economic feasibility and climatic impact/carbon mitigation potential. In this work assessment of effectiveness of novel design intervention through retrofitting of internal radiative control in an Indian solar box cooker, one of the most popular family cookers in India, has been investigated using available tools. The solar cooker, with the minimal design intervention, and negligible cost implication shows an improvement of 6.74%, and 6.86% in the values of figures of merit, F 1 and F 2 , respectively, used for the thermal performance evaluation. Here, the standard test procedure for figures of merit mainly accounts for the thermal aspect of the performance as it excludes the use of external booster reflector. Alternatively, the Cooker opto-thermal ratio (COR), a parameter measuring opto-thermal performance, shows a 1.25-fold increase. The retrofitted reflectors enhance localised targeted absorption and reduce thermal losses, resulting in a 25% improvement in COR. The retrofitting process is simple, and easy; and offers superior performance, favourable economics, and potential for carbon mitigation, making it highly attractive. Also, this work demonstrates COR as a tool with higher resolution enabling analysis of the impact of even minimal design intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]