This team of engineers use diesel soot to convert them into valuable products and curbing air pollution, for them pollution is good.
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Environment
Delhi is gradually strengthening its position as one of the most polluted cities in India. No surprise it may join the top list of World’s most polluted cities, environmental activists have given their alarms that the skies of Delhi may also affect the neighboring states like UP, Punjab, and Haryana. On many bad days, the pride national capital remains covered in a blanket of smog, and elevated particulate matter give us nightmares, apart from gifting people with respiratory ailments. Earlier official reports said that the PM 2.5 levels of Delhi air were 10 times the acceptable limit, which is very serious concern.
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| The Chakr team with their samples |
Given the problem, what’s the solution to this menace - wearing a costly mask or moving to a hill station or living with it? Well to some they are. Amidst the doom mongers three IIT-Delhi alumni, who are also close friends, found that these solutions were not long term and thus, they created a start-up that aimed at fighting pollution, head on.
It all started when these friends went to drink their favorite sugarcane juice in the streets of Delhi, where the cane crusher was running on a diesel generator but its emissions couldn't be seen. The Juice seller had an exhaust pipe to divert the emissions to a wall instead.
"We noticed that the wall had turned black from the diesel soot and thought whether we can use this carbon? If it can colour the wall black, it can surely be utilised as paint. But the idea was thought to be impractical," said Arpit, co-founder of Chakr.
When these youngsters shared this idea to many it seemed “idiotic”. Well, no surprise, great things starts like this.
Time came for the establishment of Chakr Innovations, co-founded by Arpit along with Kushagra Srivastava and Prateek Sachan, also engineers from IIT-Delhi. Chakr uses a patented technology (Chakr shield) to convert diesel soot into ink and paint.
But, why the name ‘Chakr’?
“We call it Chakr because it’s a cyclic process, where we use pollutants to create ink and paint — which is a value-added product, created out of waste,” he explains.
Kushagra says, “The pollution captured by our device is used for manufacturing of ink. In this way we convert discarded pollutants into a value-added product, thus completing a cycle.”
He also said, “Air pollution is one of the leading causes of death in India. According to reports by Greenpeace India, every year nearly 1.2 million people lose their life due to air pollution in the country. It also causes the loss of 3% of GDP. One of the main sources of this pollution is diesel generators. This motivated our team to work on the technology that not only reduces the pollution from DG sets but also in turn reduces the pollution caused in manufacturing regular ink.”
Anmol Khandelwal, the sales and marketing manager of the start-up tells how the Chakr shield actually works.
While their attempt of curbing pollution seems effective and innovative, Anmol says that convincing people about taking pollution seriously, is in itself a big challenge.
“Even though our market is in the business-to-business sector, it still takes a lot of time and manpower to make people aware of the aftermath of air pollution, and why the device is helpful.”
The Lantern wishes a great success to all their future endeavors. These young minds can be reached by their official website or through their Facebook page.
Shiva Shankar Pandian, Journalist, The Lantern
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