Visit Delhi in winter and you will most probably be greeted with a thick layer of smog, the result of hundreds of thousands of exhaust pipes, cooking stoves and factories. This situation gets aggravated every November when farmers burn their fields during harvest season.
It is a big issue. A 2019 study in the Lancet revealed that pollution caused 1.7 million deaths in India, and led to an increase in everything from asthma to cancer. Indeed, a recent World Air Quality report revealed that six of the world’s top ten most polluted cities are in India, with Delhi ranked as the most polluted capital city in the world.
Enter Takachar, an Indian start-up that aims to eliminate crop burning and generate revenue for farmers in the Developed World. The idea is simple: buy biomass (usually straw, coconut shells and rice husks) from farmers and turn it – via Takachar’s own machine – into either charcoal or fertiliser. This not only prevents emissions, but creates an income for farmers. Founded by Vidyut Mohan and Kevin Chung in 2018, the company was born out of Mohan’s thesis in Energy Systems and Engineering. “I kept working on the idea that started with the thesis, and eventually I just stumbled into the business, which I saw as the only way to get any impact from it,” he says.
The product Mohan and Chung developed is a portable machine that “roasts” agricultural waste at high temperatures and converts it into fertiliser, charcoal and activated carbon. It does this through a chemical process called oxygen-lean torrefaction, which takes place in a portable reactor. “It was key that we developed a product that required little behavioural change from the farmers, who have been working the same way for decades,” Mohan says. The machine can consume 200kg of biomass per hour and it costs about one third the price of traditional crop conversion equipment. The best bit? The machine runs entirely on the heat it produces, making it completely portable.
Crop burning is a huge problem in India causing massive public health issues, as well as generating carbon emissions. “Biomass burning is a big issue in India and it got a lot of media coverage around 2014, where air quality measurements started to be taken in a serious way,” Mohan says. “It is an issue that affected my own life, so I was interested in exploring it further and to try and understand the reasons behind it.”
It was also key that a financial incentive was part of the project, something that has been vital in driving change. “We purchase the crop residue from the farmers, so there is a value put on that residue,” says Mohan. “The farmers are then incentivised to not burn the residue, so they are happy to supply it to us, and they also avoid any fines they might get for burning their waste.”
Takachar’s equipment is portable, which means it can be easily operated in rural areas. “Typically it would be sold to a village-level entrepreneur who would own and operate the equipment,” Mohan says. “This could be a wealthy farmer or a village level agri-business such as a rice mill or a coconut oil factory that is used to dealing with large quantities of biomass. In order to reduce the [business] risk associated with our equipment, we charge a very low up-front asset cost and charge a usage fee per ton of usage for the biomass.”
The challenges in setting up a business like this were many, according to Mohan. “Developing a hardware product takes time in terms of research and development and engineering as well as getting it to market. The second challenge is making behavioural change in rural communities. Farmers have been used to working the way they have for decades, so embedding a solution which does not require a lot of behavioural change was the key to success,” he says.
Yet for many rural communities, sustainability was an embedded part of life, with a “low emission” lifestyle the norm in these places. “Over time that has been changing with more and more rural people aspiring to a more consumerist lifestyle.”
Currently, Takachar works with 5,000 farmers in Kenya, where it sells a fertiliser made out of biomass. In India, they are working on two main pilot programmes, in the south of the country with coconut farmers and in the north with rice farmers, where they will be converting rice straws (part of the waste from the production process) into fertiliser and selling to farmers.
As to whether innovation can get us to a net zero world, Mohan is optimistic. “I may be biased, as I am exposed to a lot of entrepreneurs trying to solve these problems, so I think we will see more and more innovative solutions.” As for the role of the government, Mohan would like to see more action. “I think there needs to be bolder policy changes, so corporations are forced to act faster. I think the third aspect is behavioural change, which can be the hardest part – how can we lead a lifestyle that naturally leads to a reduction in energy usage.”