The Father Of Invention

Image Courtesy: Mitticool

Jyoti Pande Lavakare in the Business Standard:

Imagine a refrigerator that runs without electricity, keeps your perishables cool for five to seven days and costs you less than the price of a single meal for one person in a luxury hotel. It’s cool, it’s green and it’s affordable for the people at the bottom of the pyramid. But despite being around for seven years in a poor, tropical country like India, only 4,000 units have been sold so far (including to Africa, Dubai and America). Even today, not many of us know about the eco-friendly Mitticool refrigerator, and if I wanted to buy one myself, I still wouldn’t be able to get it at my local store — it would have to be couriered to me from a tiny village near Rajkot.

Mitticool is built with clay, ingeniously designed by Mansukhlal Raghavjibhai Prajapati, the son of a potter in rural Gujarat, using the same principle of cooling through evaporation that a surahi uses. He has also created a clay water-filter with a 0.9 micron candle (which costs Rs 400), a clay pressure cooker (Rs 350) and a non-stick tawa (Rs 100). And on April 1, he will launch a tandoori roti maker for Rs 250, so that we needn’t depend on the local dhaba for our occasional fix.

Read on at the Business Standard

Link courtesy pragmatic_d