TLE on UVA 10776 - Determine The Combination - recursion

Question

I tried this problem by backtracking and did some optimization, though I am getting TLE. what further optimization can I do on this code?
Abridged problem statement - Task is to print all different r combinations of a string s (a r combination of a string s is a collection of exactly r letters from different positions in s).There may be different permutations of the same combination; consider only the one that has its r
characters in non-decreasing order. If s = "abaa" and s = 3.Then output should be (aaa,aab).
My code(in c)
int compare_chars(const void* a, const void* b);
char s[50];
int len;
int r ;
char combination[50];
void combinate(int index,int at)
{
if(at == r)
{
combination[at] = '\0';
puts(combination);
return ;
}
int i = index+1;
for ( ; i <= len-r+at ;)
{
char temp = s[I];
combination[at] = temp;
combinate(i,at+1);
while(s[i] == temp and i <= len-r+at)
i++;
}
return ;
}
int solve()
{
while ((scanf("%s %i",s,&r)) == 2)
{
len = strlen(s);
if(len == r)
{
printf("%s\n",s);
continue;
}
qsort(s,len,sizeof(char),compare_chars);
combinate(-1,0);
}
return 0;
}
int main()
{
int a = 1;
int t = 1;
while (a <= t)
{
int kk = solve();
}
return 0;
}
int compare_chars(const void* a, const void* b)
{
char arg1 = *(const char*)a;
char arg2 = *(const char*)b;
if (arg1 < arg2) return -1;
if (arg1 > arg2) return 1;
return 0;
}