Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Sandip Patil | The man with the invisible thread
BackBack

Sandip Patil | The man with the invisible thread

Sandip Patil rose above the circumstances of a deprived childhood and has been a key contributor to India's nanotechnology projects

Sandip Patil, with his machine and staff, at the Sidbi Incubation Centre, IIT, Kanpur. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint Premium
Sandip Patil, with his machine and staff, at the Sidbi Incubation Centre, IIT, Kanpur. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

Freedom to innovate | Sandip Patil

Sandip Patil, 32, will tell you about his PhD in reusable adhesives—inspired by a frog’s foot—how he never used that degree to find a job, and how he hopes his fortune will come from a machine that spins fibres about 1,000 times finer than a human hair, virtually invisible threads that can be woven together to create revolutionary new textiles, filters and medical materials.

Patil will also tell you about the days his father—a first-grade-educated former contract farmer and now canal worker—struggled to put two meals on the table, how the young Patil left home at age 6 because there was no school near his home in northern Maharashtra and how he is, to this day, the only person from his village to get a college degree.

To understand what independence and freedom can mean to a person trying to break free of generational shackles and break through scientific frontiers is to understand Patil’s journey from the arid village of Pimpri—where his younger brother is still a cotton farmer—to the cerebral expanses of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K). It is to understand the role of not just doggedness and education but mentors, ideas and ideals in the course of crossing those frontiers.

Patil’s frontier is nanotechnology, the science of very small things, the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules. It is an emerging discipline that has seen great interest in India over the last decade, but there have been far too few breakthroughs and commercial applications, things that transform everyday life.

Patil hopes to change some of that with a fabric that can resist cold and water. His work flows from something called high-voltage electro-spinning, a technology patented more than a century ago but put to use only since the turn of the 21st century. Simply put, nanoscale electro-spinning is modern weaving, with threads you cannot see, drawn from a drop of liquid polymer, or material. Patil’s machine infuses a polymer drop with an electric charge and spins it out of a fine nozzle in the form of a jet. When the threads dry and lose their charge after contact with air, what is left are super-thin fibres, each no more than the width of a virus.

Electro-spun thread is strong yet stretchable and infused with the properties of the polymers it is spun from, raw material for a range of new applications. The machine that made this virtually invisible thread was fabricated in-house at IIT-K after Patil’s mentor, Ashutosh Sharma, a much-awarded professor (among many others, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences, 2002, and the Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science, 2010), asked him to make one four years ago.

“I took that challenge," says Patil, whose speech still carries the brogue of his native land. “The machine was the only reason I did not take a job. I invested everything I had in it." That amount came to 9 lakh, a fortune for a canal worker’s son. It was cobbled together with his student scholarship and money borrowed from friends and Sharma, who, despite being a fount of nanotechnologies, has found Indian industry inadequate to the task of commercializing them.

“My philosophy is, instead of chasing companies, create them," says Sharma. His trendsetter was Patil, who overcame nerves not just with encouragement, but a clear plan for profits. His company, E-Spin Nanotech Pvt. Ltd, was founded in 2010. He developed the original machine with help from Sharma and other students, six of whom got their MTech degrees and two PhDs from working on that prototype.

I took that challenge.The machine was the only reason I did not take a job. I invested everything I had in it.

Patil is satisfied that he has balanced his wildly differing worlds. “My mom wanted a nice house," explains Patil. “During my PhD I built a house for my parents, and I told them I don’t need anything from you."

While Patil’s chosen path offers independence and excitement, it will not be easy. One of Sharma’s breakthroughs seven years ago offers a cautionary tale. Inspired by the way a frog’s foot sticks to any surface, Sharma, Patil and a team of researchers created a new sticky tape, reusable and 30 times stronger than normal. They mimicked a frog’s patterned footpad—laced underneath with glands and blood vessels—to create a soft, elastic material filled with air- or oil-filled micro-channels. It was a clever trick, but no one quite knew how to get the frog-inspired sticky tape to a production line. By 2011, Sharma and team had it figured, but three years later, it is—despite a global patent—frustratingly distant from market.

After 10 months of negotiations with the representative of a global company he does not name, Sharma found himself frustrated when the man resigned: “They say, can I talk to their people in Minnesota?"

Start-ups are the only way that Indian scientific research can reach the country’s great, growing market, says Sharma—especially start-ups that take the road less travelled. It’s much harder and unsexy to make machines from scratch in a country that grew its global reputation from—and created a comfort zone in—writing software or computer code.

The emerging world of nanotechnology increasingly underscores a variety of products, from skin lotions (the cosmetics company L’Oréal has one of the biggest banks of nanotech patents) to filters on battle tanks. In this nano world, manufacturing changes dramatically. Things are not built directly, with bolts and power drills, but indirectly, through temperature changes and electric fields—as applied, for instance, to the liquid polymer drop in Patil’s machine—that persuade individual atoms and molecules to assemble themselves into a useful object, such as the nanofibre that the canal worker’s son has learnt to weave.

“We will roll up our sleeves and get into the hardware," says Sharma. “To do that, the first thing is to convince a middle-class student not to look for job security." With Patil, he’s had a promising start.

Samar Halarnkar is a Mint columnist and the author of A Married Man’s Guide To Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 09 Aug 2014, 12:21 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App