The Indian Start-Up That Won A Million Pounds

India won big at the ‘Oscars’, just not the one you know. Meet Takachar co-founder Vidyut Mohan whose clean air solution impressed the world...

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Vidhya and I'm speaking to Brute.

00:14My message to the youth of India, if they're interested to fight climate change, I would

00:20say what's stopping you.

00:46So Takachar basically has two meanings, I mean in India you could think of it as meaning

00:52of wealth from carbon, in Swahili it means waste to carbon.

01:11We started Takachar to drastically scale the utilization of waste biomass in the form

01:17of agriculture and forest waste that are usually burnt in the open by farmers.

01:22That leads to air pollution problems worldwide.

01:40So the technology that we use is quite simple and easy to operate.

01:44These are small scale, low cost equipment that process agricultural and forest waste

01:52such as rice straws or rice husks, coconut shells, cocaine trash into valuable products

01:57such as fuels and fertilizers.

01:59It heats it between 200 to 350 degrees Celsius in controlled amounts of air that leaves behind

02:07a dense carbon rich material.

02:09And this dense carbon rich material can be used to make these valuable products.

02:21So there's an entrepreneur who's operating our equipment, they run it as a business,

02:26they also employ other people from the village.

02:29So it also creates livelihood opportunities in the village itself.

03:00One million pounds will help us scale beyond our pilots and also scale our pilots in our

03:07locations such as Northern India, Southern India, Kenya and even the Pacific West Coast

03:12of the US and Canada.

03:24You know, these recognitions help us a lot as they highlight the problem that we are

03:30working on and our solution on a global stage and help us get access to resources so that

03:35we're able to scale faster and thus achieve what we have set as a mission faster.

03:46You can identify problems in your local neighborhood and you know, you can initiate solutions locally

04:01and you know, solve those problems locally in that area and if a lot of people are able

04:06to do that, we can, I think, collectively have a large impact together.