Free Indian Innovators by Akshat Agrawal Page A

engineer who had to quit his job due to a physical disability, decided to turn it into the mecca for IIT-JEE preparation. He set up Bansal Classes, often referred to as “the factory for IITians”. Today, every street in Kota boasts of a coaching institute and thousands of students from across the country flock here to prepare for the tough engineering and medical entrance exams.
     
    “I came to know about IIT only after landing in Kota and decided to give it a shot. I switched to the science stream at my new school in Kota and joined the prestigious Bansal Classes. A few years of hard work later, I found my name on the IIT-JEE merit list and decided to pursue a five- year, dual-degree program in Chemical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur.
     
    The grooming at IIT would perhaps be the single most important reason for my eventual success. I got to learn so much from every person I met there. I learned to work in a team and the environment there pushed me to continuously do better than what I thought I was capable of. My attitude toward learning new things and facing challenges became even more aggressive.”
     
    After completing his third year of engineering, Prateek secured a summer internship at University of Perugia, Italy, where he worked on carbon-removal systems for the first time.
     
    Like everything else before that, he excelled at it, and in the process, realized that carbon-removal technologies had several practical applications, especially due to the increased focus of governments around the world on “clean” (more environment-friendly) technologies.
     
    “After returning to IIT, I discussed my work with some friends, including Aniruddha Sharma, who too had worked on a very challenging project during his summer internship at University of Bern, Switzerland.”
     
    Interestingly, both Aniruddha and Prateek had prepared for the IIT-JEE in Kota, but didn’t know each other until they found themselves in the same classroom at IIT.
     
    The two immediately realized the huge market potential for carbon-removal technology and decided to work together to perfect it and validate the results (that is, ascertain how effective it was in removing carbon from effluents in practice).
     
    “It struck us that so many foreign universities were already working on it, and here in India, we had hardly heard anything about it. We thought if we could develop a technology, there would be a good market for it.”
     
    They quickly created a business plan for the “technology to capture CO 2 from industrial flue gases” and sent it as an entry for IDEAS-2008, a business plan competition at IIT Bombay. Their business plan won the third prize.
     
    “It was a shot in the arm. We then decided to take it very seriously and implement the plan.
     
    With our confidence higher than ever, we presented our idea at the Pan-IIT Global Conference in Chennai, the same year. We were awarded the Business Conclave Award jointly by Tata Motors and Tata Steel. To receive that kind of appreciation, from the most illustrious of IIT alumni, was like a dream.
     
    The best part was that the plan earned us more than a trophy, certificate or cash prize. A mentor approached us and entrusted us with some seed capital to validate the results, assuring us that if the results were positive (as good as what had been hypothesized), he would connect us with the right investors.”
     
    With this agreement in place, they founded a company, aptly named Carbon Clean Solutions Pvt Ltd (CCS). However, this also brought them face-to-face with their first set of problems.
     
    “We were still at IIT and the labs were not equipped for the kind of experimentation we wanted to undertake. Moreover, any research done or products/processes developed at IIT, using IIT’s resources, belong to IIT per the rules. Thus, there could have been difficulties in commercializing it.
     
    There was hardly any technical competency available in the country in this field, so we could