In times of calamity, Alakh is consistently called upon—whether it’s the 2021 Chamoli floods or the collapse of the Silkyara Bend–Barkot tunnel. On November 12, as a section of the tunnel crumbled, ensnaring 41 laborers, the domestically engineered drone navigated through inaccessible debris. Its sensors visually perceived and recorded crucial first-hand information essential for orchestrating the 17-day rescue operation.

Alakh is a creation of EndureAir, a startup incubated by IIT-Kanpur, focused on designing and manufacturing unmanned aerial vehicles. Currently, the team is in the process of developing a drone with the capacity to transport up to 20 kilograms of ‘cargo’ for delivery to high-altitude army posts. EndureAir is among the 300-plus startups that have been nurtured and incubated at IIT-Kanpur’s Startup Incubation and Innovation Centre (SIIC), fundamentally altering the way we experience our lives.

The institute’s incubation cell is driving startups to address national challenges through science-based, sustainable solutions, ranging from monitoring fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions to developing biodegradable ‘plastics’ using bamboo and chicken feathers. Additionally, they are pioneering initiatives such as designing solar panels inspired by sunflowers. Among these innovative endeavors, one startup is repurposing discarded temple flowers to create vegan leather, while another is employing nanotechnology to revitalize deteriorating soil.

At IIT-Kanpur, many entrepreneurs arrive with promising ideas, yet what they often lack is the strategic plan to transform those ideas into viable businesses. Since its establishment in 2000, SIIC at IIT-Kanpur has been at the forefront of the innovation race. Serving as a catalyst for change, the incubation center facilitates connections between entrepreneurs and scientists with funders, while also offering crucial infrastructural support.

Aside from being among the pioneering incubators in Uttar Pradesh, IIT-Kanpur boasts two notable advantages. Firstly, it receives substantial funding from corporations as a component of their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.

“This year alone, we will be giving out INR 15 crore from our CSR funding,” said professor Amitabha Bandyopadhyay, who is on the board of directors at SIIC.

The second benefit is that IIT Kanpur possesses its own investment corpus of INR 50 crore.

“This is important because we primarily promote hardware startups, which are yet to become popular among venture capitalists or angel investors,” Bandyopadhyay added.

The institute’s potential became evident to the rest of the country when a national crisis unfolded.

“The real boost really happened during Covid. Our incubator delivered so many products one after the other that we became very prominent,” the professor said, referring to the ventilator project, which was developed and introduced in the market within 90 days. “Suddenly, the number of incubatees applying to our cell went through the roof,” Bandyopadhyay said.

He mentioned that a significant challenge as an incubator is the uncertainty about what exactly to anticipate and prepare for.

“If it is your own research lab, you know the research programme for the next 15-20 years. So you set up the equipment accordingly.”

The infrastructure of an incubator should accommodate its incubatees, even though they change every few years. This constant transience is what keeps the SIIC vigilant and adaptable.

Eight years ago, on a chilly Makar Sankranti morning, the startup Phool began its journey. Founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal took a friend visiting from the Czech Republic to the ghats of the Ganga, where the friend’s questions about the excessive waste dumped into the holy waters prompted Agarwal’s thoughtful reflection.

He conceived a straightforward idea: gather discarded flowers from temples and transform them into incense sticks. Yet, persuading the priests proved challenging. Hindu rituals dictate that flowers offered to devotees must be submerged in holy waters.

Agarwal’s team invested considerable time in persuading the temple priests, ultimately achieving success by installing bins to store these flowers for later collection by the Phool team.

Phool provided steady and dignified employment to women from families involved in manual scavenging.

Presently, hundreds of women in villages across Uttar Pradesh are handcrafting agarbattis (incense sticks) from recycled flowers, and among Phool’s investors is Alia Bhatt.

However, this marked merely the initial phase in Phool’s exploration of innovative solutions for organic waste. Nachiket Kuntla, an MTech graduate from IIT Kanpur and the lead research scientist of the startup, remembers the team stumbling upon a whitish mold in the stack of discarded flowers.

The team discovered that fungal growth was transforming used flowers into a substance resembling thermocol. This realization led to the creation of Florafoam—an organic packaging material crafted from discarded flowers and agricultural waste. Kuntla is currently conducting trials with several companies to explore the possibility of replacing conventional packaging with ‘Florafoam.’

Through their research, they have pioneered the creation of vegan leather using biomass. The company is currently in discussions with an international brand to investigate the potential for developing products utilizing this innovative leather.

Agarwal emphasizes that achieving this wouldn’t have been feasible without the assistance of SIIC.

“We started with a room in the SIIC lab that didn’t even have shelves to keep chemicals. But within a couple of days, Professor Bandyopadhyay ensured that the room was converted into a workable lab,” Agarwal recalls.

In this very space, a new startup, NovoEarth, is taking shape, led by Sarthak Gupta, as he seeks a solution to eliminate single-use plastics. His approach involves addressing a significant waste issue—chicken feathers.

“Chicken feathers are a menace for municipalities with poultry farms paying them to get rid of this waste,” said Gupta.

However, a keratin protein discovered in chicken feathers can be transformed into compostable polymers, offering the potential to create products that serve as alternatives to single-use plastics.

Santosh Kumar, the founder of Pacing Grass, shares a common goal but employs a distinct approach. Kumar has transformed bamboo fiber into a composite material resembling plastic, suitable for crafting microwave-friendly utensils, industrial machine parts, crates, and various other applications.

Both NovoEarth’s and Pacing Grass’ products come in the form of pellets. These pellets can be adopted by the conventional plastic industry to substitute their raw materials, eliminating the necessity for a comprehensive overhaul of the entire production line dedicated to single-use plastics.

Situated approximately 4 km from Kanpur’s industrial area in Panki, there is a neighborhood just off Kanpur Road characterized by lanes flanked by unadorned brick houses. In this setting, the Katiyar family’s residence stands out, marked by a distinctive feature. Unlike the typical rooftops adorned with hanging lines of drying clothes, the Katiyars’ roof proudly displays a set of solar panels.

These solar panels are far from ordinary. Featuring ‘Solar Trackers,’ the panels are designed to autonomously adjust their alignment to face the sun. This innovative technology enhances the power generation potential of standard solar panels by 40 percent. Developed by the IIT-incubated startup SunSync Technologies Pvt Ltd, the Solar Trackers take inspiration from the behavior of sunflowers. An algorithm, utilizing the GPS location of the panels, computes the sun’s position in the sky.

According to Priya Katiyar, a family member, their electricity expenses have significantly decreased.

“But we are planning to increase the panels because it [the bill] has not yet gone to zero,” she said.

Swaraj Patil, the chief technology officer of SunSync Technologies, and Rahul Gupta, a third-generation entrepreneur, conceived the Solar Trackers. Currently, the team is not only gearing up to introduce this technology to international markets but also working on establishing a robust market for Solar Trackers within India.

Akshay Srivastava, an engineer from a family of farmers, refused to be deterred when security guards at the gate of IIT-Kanpur turned him away after traveling 450 km from his village in Gorakhpur to meet professors. Undeterred, he persisted in his pursuit.

During his engineering studies at Madan Mohan Malaviya University of Technology in Gorakhpur, Srivastava identified a cost-effective solution to enhance soil yield. This alternative, more affordable than organic fertilizers and a substitute for the chemical counterparts relied upon by farmers, became apparent to him. Srivastava observed a tenfold increase in the necessary amount of chemical fertilizers for the same parcel of land over the past decade.

“We discovered that the microbes in the soil that break down these chemical fertilisers were decreasing,” he said.

Although the solution lay in organic fertilizers, the ones available in the market failed to deliver satisfactory results. Furthermore, the use of organic fertilizers escalated the investment, he noted, explaining why farmers initially resorted to chemical fertilizers.

“We keep increasing our investment, but the yield keeps reducing,” he said. Srivastava aims to break this vicious cycle through LCB Fertilisers.

Initially, LCB began isolating microbes from regions untouched by chemical fertilizers. “For three years, we worked with microbial combinations that were customised based on the nutrients a crop needs,” Srivastava explained. The team obtained an internship opportunity at IIT-BHU, where they carried out a portion of their research.

Srivastava formally registered his company on February 12, 2020. “But then Covid happened.” As the country went into lockdown, all the team’s microbial cultures in the lab died. “About seven years of our work was wiped out. We were completely broke.”

Left with only about INR 7,000 in his pocket, he once more gathered microbial samples from fields and formulated fertilizers.

Their first significant order, amounting to 40 kg of fertilizer, was received from Kannauj. Operating on a tight budget, Srivastava personally transported the bag of fertilizer on a bus bound for Lucknow. He enlisted the help of a friend in Lucknow to unload it and arrange for its transfer onto another bus destined for Kannauj.

“When you don’t have money, friends come to your help,” said Mukesh Singh Chauhan, LCB’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Following each successful order, Srivastava consistently tagged Amitabha Bandyopadhyay of IIT Kanpur on X (formerly Twitter) until one day when the professor eventually reached out to them.

Currently, his startup is advancing its products further by incorporating nanotechnology.

The C3iHub at IIT-Kanpur, featuring expansive screens, mirrors a setting reminiscent of spy movies. Along the walls, black screens showcase numbers, pie charts, codes, and layouts of chemical plants. In contrast to the engineering and chemical labs within the institute, this hall maintains impeccable cleanliness—perhaps owing to the fact that typical scientific equipment like conical flasks, wires, or chemicals holds no relevance here.

The C3i lab is committed to conducting research in the realm of cybersecurity. Its focus ranges from unraveling the trails of cryptocurrency transactions to safeguarding the operations of industrial plants that could pose a significant threat if subjected to hacking, emphasizing the fortification of the virtual world.

In this cutting-edge environment, Deepesh Chaudhari, the founder and CEO of Block Stash, is crafting an analytical tool designed to scrutinize and monitor illicit activities associated with cryptocurrencies.

“Currently, all investigations stop if fraud happens with cryptocurrencies. This is because most investigative agencies are not trained to deal with cryptocurrencies. Many do not even understand the concept.” explains Chaudhuri.

Block Stash is partnering with the police departments of West Bengal and Odisha to address and solve such crimes.

“At present, we can trace illegal transactions. Although we cannot always trace back to the user, we are at least able to identify and tag suspicious addresses associated with illicit accounts,” he said.

In contrast to conventional financial fraud, which often targets the elderly population less acquainted with technology, victims of cryptocurrency crimes tend to be younger and highly educated. “This makes them hesitate to report the crime,” Chaudhari said.

He aspires for Block Stash to foster awareness regarding cryptocurrency crimes among users and law enforcement agencies in India.

Adarsh Kant’s Cyber3ra is also dedicated to securing cyberspace, but it has taken a distinct approach. Cyber3ra provides a platform for a collective of independent ethical hackers. Any company seeking to oversee its digital assets can register on this platform.

The ethical hacker team systematically endeavors to penetrate the specified systems, and those who identify and report vulnerabilities receive a ‘bounty.’

Currently, more than 300 startups have completed their incubation at SIIC, where 163 companies are currently being nurtured. SIIC’s strong funding support facilitates the advancement of hardware startups, a sector that has not yet garnered substantial interest from venture capitalists or angel investors.

Ashish Gaikwad from Reflex Drive, specializing in drone components, emphasizes that while India is a hub for software development, there is minimal investment in hardware research due to its capital-intensive nature.

“But because we have our own investment corpus, we can plug in that critical lacuna. I think that more ambitious startups are now coming to IIT Kanpur. Many of them are at the national forefront,” said Bandyopadhyay.

Even during the nighttime hours, numerous laboratories at IIT Kanpur are well-illuminated, as dedicated teams persistently labor on the pursuit of the next groundbreaking concept. In a particular workspace, where a particle accelerator commands attention, Chirag Agarwal showcases a compact handheld device—a portable X-ray machine. Through his startup, Lenek Technology, he aims to revolutionize TB screening in India.