He hated capitalism and capitalists, but four decades after rejecting a corporate career,
S.S. Sivakumar, now 61, has become a capitalist himself.
Only, he started late. In 2004, Sivakumar, then a professor of economics at the University of Madras, sought an early retirement that was granted.
Soon after, he founded Akash Ganga International (AGI), a company that makes water from, well, thin air.
All his life, Sivakumar, who looks an unlikely capitalist in his casual trousers, shirt, and bushy white moustache, has been interested in understanding what makes some people rich, and others poor.
At the Delhi School of Economics, where he completed his doctorate, his thesis was on this subject. He studied 200 families across three generations in rural India. His conclusion: “Affluence is a matter of chance.”
S.S. Sivakumar is an economist-turned-entrepreneur. The scientific basis behind his air-to-water conversion is the heat exchange process: in this case, it involves sucking in air from the atmosphere and blowing it over cold gas, resulting in the creation of water
That discovery changed his political viewpoint. “By the time I finished the field work, the Naxalite in me died,” says Sivakumar, referring to the term used to describe a school of thought adopted by militant followers of a kind of Maoist communism.
His interest in understanding the genesis of wealth did not. In 1984, with wife Chitra, a sociologist, Sivakumar embarked on a decade-long research study on class (wealth), caste, and resources such as water and land. By the end of the study, he was convinced that water, or the absence of it, held the key.
Water plays a dominant role in Indian politics and economics. Agriculture, which accounts for 18% of the country’s gross domestic product and which is the livelihood of 60% of the population, depends on the monsoon and most states have long-running disputes with their neighbours over the sharing of river waters.
An entire economic ecosystem, comprising mineral water companies, makers of water purifiers, service providers that deliver tanker-loads of water, and installers of reverse osmosis plants, has sprung up around water.
The idea for Akash Ganga came to Sivakumar in 2004, mainly as an offshoot of his research. He bounced the idea off Prof. M.K. Sundaresan, a physicist at Carlton University, Canada. It would work, said Sundaresan, and followed up with a contribution of $13,500 (then Rs6 lakh).
The scientific basis behind Sivakumar’s air-to-water conversion is the heat exchange process: In this case, it involves sucking in air from the atmosphere and blowing it over cold gas resulting in the creation of water (in much the same way, condensate, or water, forms on the outside of the windows of a heated room in winter or an air-conditioned room in summer).