Yash Bhatt along with Arjun Thakkar launched their own start-up, Brook and Blooms, in 2018, while they were engineering students. They had noticed the large amount of flowers routinely being carried from places of worship and dumped into water bodies. They wanted to utilise the flowers and convert them into something useful. Says Bhatt, “We collect flower waste from temples and various other places and recycle them by means of a special upcycling process. We convert these into organic and nutritious fertilisers, natural incense cones, coir pots and coco peat.”
Bhatt, who graduated last year, says, “I am giving my full time to the start-up but I am planning to enhance my management skills.” Brook and Blooms, which is based in Gujarat, currently employs 22 people.
The demand for ventilators has skyrocketed in recent times. Most of the ventilators available in the market are imported and quite expensive. Rajesh Thangave was struck by the great demand, even desperation for ventilators when he visited hospitals in 2018-2019. At the time, the 27-year-old was pursuing his biodesign healthcare programme from IIT Hyderabad’s Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship. Says Thangave, who co-founded Aerobiosys Innovations Private Limited in 2019, “We developed Jeevan Lite — a portable, cost-effective, IoT-enabled, battery-operated ICU care ventilation system. Each breath parameter of the patient is recorded by the ventilator and transferred via Bluetooth to our android application. This data is stored in our cloud facility for clinician’s to analyse the patient’s progress.” IoT stands for Internet of Things or objects that collect and transfer data over a wireless network without human intervention .
Says Thangave, who did his masters in biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, or IIT-B, “Currently, we are a team of 15 members and fiveo interns. We have established a production plant in Pondicherry and we plan to expand our team.”
The raging pandemic and its associated horrific experiences shook up the 20-somethings Samriddho Ghosh and Shrestha Baisnab. Ghosh is a student of architecture at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and Baisnab a first-year MBA student at the Indian Institute Management, Kashipur, in Uttarakhand. They came up with a user-friendly website. This website was built by a diverse group of youngsters, all students from various colleges of Calcutta.
DHOOND 1.0 is a platform that plots all Covid-19 related resources — oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, ICU facilities, ambulances, food delivery — on a map of Calcutta so Covid-19 patients can find resources in and around their location in the hour of their need. “Using location intelligence, we use the end-user data to strengthen the online platform to serve on a larger scale,” says Ghosh. The website has been used by more than 50,000 people to date. He adds, “We are happy to see a declining amount of users at the moment but we are gearing up for the not-so-wanted third wave.”
Aabid Rehman Dar, 24, is a student of civil engineering at Smt. S.R. Patel Engineering College, Dabhi, Gujarat. But his home is in Kashmir and understandably his concerns too. Kashmir faces heavy to light snowfall in the winter months. During this time, agricultural activities come to a stop and the roads are jammed with snow, which makes movement arduous. In 2020, Dar came up with a grassroots innovation in the form of a mini snow cleaner. The conventional snow cleaners can only effectively remove snow from big roads, leaving the lanes and by-lanes snow clogged. “The mini snow remover can be used to clear the big and narrow roads efficiently. The machine will be advantageous for every district of Kashmir Valley,” shares Dar, who has received funding and completed the prototype. By end-October, he intends to complete 30 to 40 units of the mini snow cleaner before commercialising.
Professor Anil K. Gupta, who is a CSIR Bhatnagar fellow and visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, IIT-B and AcSIR, has some words of wisdom for young innovators. After all, he is a pioneer in the field of grassroots innovation and has founded the Honey Bee Network, SRISTI, Global Initiative of Academic Networks and National Innovation Foundation, all of which encourage funds and promote grassroots innovation. Prof. Gupta says, “Learn from potential users. Patience is important, don’t fall in love with the very first design you develop. Always be ready to learn and accept mistakes. Ultimately, finishing, good design and robust functionality are important.”
