Indian Innovators (6 page)

Then, a miracle happened. Prof Anil Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad heard of my story and came to visit me. He was impressed with the refrigerator and invited me to come to Ahmedabad.

Mujhe laga ki koi
loan
dila denge, to socha ek baar jaate toh hain Ahmedabad, shayad kuchh kaam ban jae. Par jab main Ahmedabad gaya to unhon ne mujhe GIAN waalon se milaya.”
(I thought he would help me get a loan. So, I thought of going to Ahmedabad
to see if anything useful could come of the visit. But when I went there, he arranged for a meeting with GIAN.)

GIAN, or Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network, is an incubator of grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge. GIANs have been set up at Ahmedabad and Jaipur to provide incubation support to grassroots innovators in West and North India, respectively. GIAN cells are also present at Tumkur and Madurai in South India, Kashmir University in J&K and the Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology in Sikkim. GIAN works in association with the National Innovation Foundation (NIF), Honeybee Network and SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions). These organizations share the common purpose of supporting rural innovation.

At GIAN, the manager offered
2 lakh to Mansukhbhai to support his work.

“Maine bola ki main zyada byaaz nahin de sakta, to unhon ne kaha ki maine byaaz kab maanga. Ye do lakh rakh lo. Agar fridge achha ban jae aur bikne lage to wapas kar dena, nahin toh koi baat nahin hai. Main to hairan ho gaya. Aise paisa kaun deta hai, koi paper bhi nahi sign karaya. Main toh bahut khush hua. Woh toh bhagwaan banke aaye the mere liye!”
(I said I would not be able to pay a high interest. He replied that he wasn’t asking for interest. He wanted me to keep the money and repay it only if the refrigerator becomes a success, otherwise not. I couldn’t believe it. Who lends money like that! He didn’t even make me sign any papers. I was very happy to receive the money He came into my life like God.)

After experimenting with several clays and designs, Mansukhbhai finally completed the refrigerator to his desired perfection in 2004, and applied for a patent through GIAN. The refrigerator contains a water tank with a capacity of 10 liters. Through this tank, water percolates into spaces around the vegetable compartment. As it comes into contact with the air and evaporates, both the vegetable chamber and the remaining water are cooled. The water tank has a tap through which one can get the cool water. Moreover, the temperature maintained in the vegetable compartment is 10-15 degrees centigrade lower than the ambient temperature. Fruits and vegetables stay fresh up to five days, while milk lasts up to two days. The refrigerator can store up to 5 kg of fruits, vegetables, milk and other products. Because it does not cool to near-zero temperatures, fruits and vegetables retain their taste and nutrition, unlike in the electric refrigerator. Needless to say, this refrigerator is free from all CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), the environmentally harmful gases used in conventional electric refrigerators as refrigerants. This eco-friendly refrigerator, aptly named MittiCool, costs only about
3,000.

GIAN helped Mansukhbhai get a trademark for MittiCool and set up a company by the name of Clay Creations. GIAN also helped him set up a website and engaged NID (National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad) to help him create attractive packaging for MittiCool. Today, Mansukhbhai sells his eco- friendly refrigerator to people in several countries across the world.

This serial innovator then chanced upon his next.

“In 2005, my wife asked me to buy a non-stick pan for her. I found that it costs
450. I did not want to spend that much, so I learned how to coat the non-stick material and started making my own non-stick pans.

I applied Teflon coating to my clay
tawas
and sold them for just
25. I also designed a metallic support for the
tawa
to prevent breakage during daily use and later added a handle for ease of use.”

He applied for a patent for the non-stick clay pan in 2006. The next year, he participated in the annual food festival, Saatvik, at IIM Ahmedabad to showcase his kitchenware. On seeing his range of clay kitchenware, one of the visitors approached him with a suggestion to make a clay cooker.

“Hamare purvaj mitti ki haandi mein khana banate the, toh khaane ka tatva baeha rehta tha. Aajkal ke baehhon ko itni jaldi chashma lag jata hai, logon ke baal jaldi safed ho jaate hain, kyunki khaane ki paushtikta ghat gayi hai.”
(Our ancestors cooked in clay pots, which retained the nutrition in food. Today, children begin wearing spectacles at an early age and many people have prematurely graying hair, because the food we eat is less nutritious.)

In 2009, I made a cooker out of clay. A laboratory in Mumbai conducted experiments on the nutritiveness of food cooked in a steel cooker and my clay cooker. It was found that
urad dal
lost 70% of its nutrients after cooking in a steel cooker, while what was cooked in the clay cooker retained 100% nutrients even after 36 hours.”

Mansukhbhai has also made a thermos out of clay. His next aim is to make a clay house that would maintain a constant temperature of about 20 degrees without needing any electricity. Cooling would be through water and air, while lighting would be natural or stored solar energy. He is also considering making small MittiCools, which he calls Minute MittiCools, capable of cooling water within five minutes. A German home-appliances company has shown great interest in his products. He has also received several other offers for collaboration.

MittiCool non-stick pan, cooker and hot case

He is an extremely busy man and is found delivering lectures at conferences, when not working on his new ideas at his workshop-cum-lab. He has delivered an INK talk and has been featured at a conference held at the Judge School of Business, University of Cambridge, UK.

Mansukhbhai has been honored with the title of “True Scientist” by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. President Pratibha Patil awarded him the Grassroots Innovator Award. He has 25 other national awards to his name. He counts Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi among his customers and has been promised every possible support by him.
Forbes
magazine has named him “India’s Most Powerful Rural Entrepreneur” while National Geographic called him “NatGeo Eco Hero.”

Nelvin Joseph

Artificial Intelligence-based Power Saver

Nelvin, who describes himself as a happy-go-lucky nerd, had his first brush with computers in Class IV, when his dad took him to his office. Inquisitive by nature, he quickly developed a keen interest in computers and approached a computer training institute near his home, in order to learn more.

At the institute, he came across a course on C (the programming language). He thought that with such a simple name (just one character of English alphabet), the course would be very basic and easy. He decided to get enrolled, but the institute stated that he was too young for the course.

Given his curiosity, he would not take no for an answer and convinced them to let him attend the classes. Within a few months, at the age of eight years, he was a diploma holder in computer programming using C language!

Thereafter, Nelvin had to move to a hostel as his parents decided to admit him to a Sainik school. At his new school, he met some of the best teachers he has ever had. The love for books led him to spend most of his free time in the school library. The librarian grew so fond of him that he used to procure books just for Nelvin.

“Usually in Sainik schools, most people are actively involved in sports and other extracurricular activities. But I was always surrounded by books. My classmates used to jeer at me and I did not have any good friends at school.

That made me create my own world – a world in which I could let my imagination loose. It also taught me not to care about what other people think or say about me.”

During his early teens, he got to see the super-hit Hollywood movie,
The Terminator.
That sparked his interest in robots. Thanks to his resourceful librarian, he started reading more about robotics. That was his first introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

After school, he decided to pursue Electronics Engineering and joined an engineering college in Thiruvananthapuram.

“At college, I was very active in various technical activities. I used to manage the computer labs, organize events for various technical clubs and represent the college at programming competitions. I was a very active member of the IEEE (a global organization that supports activities related to electronics and electrical engineering) chapter of my college.

The higher education system in India is so rigid that it does not reward you for anything except your performance in a few exams related to the courses prescribed for your degree. So, even when I was heavily involved with technical activities at college, I was never among the toppers.”

The academics of his course did not interest him. “Engineering courses are very theoretical and outdated. The teaching is usually uninspiring and there is hardly any hands-on work involved. This inhibits learning and crushes creativity. I used to hate the curriculum in college.”

Nelvin gave vent to his creative energy via high- adrenaline gaming. He was a very active gamer and his passion for gaming earned him the nickname, Ninja.

His other passion in college was biking. “I was so crazy about bikes that I knew the technical specifications for each of them. I purchased an old Avenger for
7000 and modified it, designing and fitting all the parts myself. I even added a GPS, an audio kit, rear wheel disc brakes and an anti-lock braking system. The bike was extremely powerful. I even drove it all the way to Kanyakumari with a group of biking enthusiasts from Kerala.”

After completing the undergraduate degree, he wanted to go abroad for an MS degree in Applied Artificial Intelligence. He obtained admission to the University of Edinburgh for the course, but an unfortunate accident in 2007 prevented that dream from becoming reality.

“The night before my final college exam, I was studying with some of my friends. Late at night, we felt like having some light snacks and ventured out. I was the pillion rider on a friend’s bike. Unfortunately, our bike hit a pothole in the road and I fell off, sustaining serious injuries. As a result, I could not appear for the exam the next day and my graduation was delayed. That put paid to my plans for the MS degree. The next best thing I could do was to get a job and that’s what I did.”

Nelvin joined a call center, across the road from his home, while he was still recovering. After his recovery, he joined Dell in Bengaluru.

“Though the pay was decent, it wasn’t very exciting. I strongly felt that the job did not allow me to use my capabilities well. It was a routine hardware engineer’s job. After a while, I decided to quit and come back to Kerala.

I came back home with no concrete plans. I wanted to learn AI in greater detail in my MS, so that I could eventually start my own company in the AI domain. I thought, why not do that now, rather than later? There are enough free resources available on the internet to learn from.” He decided to start a company and use the internet to learn about product development and marketing.

Nelvin knew that his strong technical skills would not be enough for the company he envisaged. He also needed people with complementary strengths and the passion to start a business. He approached his friends and asked them to connect him with the people they knew.

“I gathered a team of six people, including myself. We rented a small house on the outskirts of the city to use as our first office. We had no products and no idea about what we should be making. The company was yet to be registered. We started brainstorming for ideas, but for several weeks, we could not come up with anything that would be commercially viable.”

One day, when returning home, Nelvin realized that he needed a document that was stored on his office computer, but there was nobody in the office to email it to him. That made him think of developing a product that could switch devices on and off remotely, but further research showed that such products already existed. However, during his research, Nelvin chanced upon the concept of phantom power.

“All electronic devices, including computers, consume power when they are in standby mode. The power consumed in the standby mode is called phantom power. This power consumption leads to around 26% of the total wastage of electricity globally, and 57% of these losses are from computers alone.

Electricity is largely produced by using fossil fuels. Thus, we are contributing to global warming even when we are not using our devices.”

Nelvin realized that a lot of electricity wastage in offices was due to negligence, which contributed to high costs for the organization. A power-saving solution based on artificial intelligence seemed to be a commercially viable venture.

According to a report by the US Department of Energy, 90% of users do not switch off their office computers while leaving for lunch or at the end of the workday. On an average, almost 100 kWh of power is wasted per computer per year because of this negligence. For a big corporation (with about 50,000 computers), this can mean an avoidable expense of over $1 million and reduction of up to 30,000 tons of carbon emissions.

“The cost of the wasted electricity can be as large as 3% of the total operating costs for some companies. Thus, reducing this wastage and saving costs can improve their competitiveness and also boost their green image,” Nelvin adds.

“Soon after realizing the commercial potential of the idea, I started working on the technology. Meanwhile, a lot of people told me that I was extremely stupid to have left a good job to try idiotic things. Not many people showed faith in my ability or my idea.”

Artin Dynamics was formally incorporated on April 15, 2008. Shortly after incorporation, Artin (short form of “artificial intelligence”) found a place in the technology business incubator, Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram. Established in 1990 by the Government of India, Technopark is one of the leading technology incubators in the country, providing office space at subsidized prices and other support services such as helping ventures with marketing and brand promotions, investor relations, global exposure, etc., in exchange for a very small stake in the company.

“When we first approached Technopark, we didn’t even know what a business plan meant. The Technopark authorities wanted us to write one, so that they could evaluate us. Fearful of revealing too much information, we wrote a few pages about artificial intelligence in general and the phantom power loss due to negligence. It contained no information on the technical details of the product, what it does and how it does that, how we planned to market it and what our revenue projections were.”

Needless to say, the application was trashed. “We were then counseled by the Technopark consultants on how we should go about preparing our business plan. We were surprised to hear that we were required to estimate the revenues for the next five years. We wondered how we would come up with such hypothetical numbers when product development was yet to be completed and there had been no validation of market demand. But the consultants were impressed by the idea and were convinced about its market potential.

With their help, we worked day in and day out to develop a satisfactory business plan. The revised plan was accepted by Technopark and we got incubated within a week. This process usually takes about 8-10 months; we have been the fastest company ever to do it.”

Artin began in a four-seat space. Within two months, it moved to an office with eight seats; and then to 16 in another two months, as new employees continued to be added. Most of the effort during this time was spent on product development. By the end of 2008, the company was ready with the first version of the product, meant only for computers.

Nelvin shares the story of how the product was named. “We were looking to give it some fancy name, yet something that represents what it is – a green technology which saves power. We started translating words like “green,” “save” and so on, using Google Translator into several languages. After several iterations, we chose SPARA, which means “save” in Swedish.

SPARA is a software that can be installed on any computer. It studies the behavior of the user to recognize his usage pattern and then automatically implements power- saving actions.

For instance, if a user takes a lunch break between 2:00 PM and 2:30 PM for about 30 minutes, SPARA would be able to recognize this pattern and automatically save and switch off the monitor when inactivity is observed around 2:00 PM. The processor will not shut down completely, as the user is expected to return soon. The user can also override it if he returns sooner, or if he wishes to set up a software response on his own. Similarly, if the software observes that the user usually leaves the office at around 6 PM, then it would automatically save and shut down the system when it observes inactivity around that time.”

Nelvin explains that SPARA is more effective than the power management system built into the computer. “If you set the computer to go into sleep mode after five minutes of inactivity is observed, it would do so, regardless of the situation. So, even if the inactivity is because the user is talking briefly to his colleague, the computer would be in sleep mode. This can get frustrating. In short, the piece of software built into the operating system is not
intelligent
enough to understand and interpret situations and adapt to human behavior. Even if there is a change in behavioral pattern due to a different user using the device, or the same user altering his habits, SPARA learns and implements the changes fast.

SPARA is four times more effective in reducing the daily power consumption of a computer, as compared to Windows Power Management. It has been observed that SPARA can help to save as much as 30% of the electricity that would otherwise have been used, which is almost three times of what could be saved by using Windows Power Management. It is as good as saying that if you use SPARA on three computers, you run the fourth for free. Usually, the investment on the device is recovered within two years.”

Regarding competition, Nelvin states that a UK-based company offers similar solutions, “but its product is not as effective as ours.

“Because our technology is superior, we had little difficulty finding customers. In fact, usually customers find us, rather than we having to find them.”

The big break for Artin came in 2009. As recession was looming large and companies were looking to cut costs,
The Economic Times
published an article on how SPARA could help companies cut expenses without reducing their employee count. Features in several newspapers followed. “The result was that, while several other established companies and start-ups were struggling during recession, Artin Dynamics grew rapidly.