Anoop

About 1 in every 3 tonnes of fruit, vegetables and milk produced in India never reaches anybody. It rots on the way, because there was no cold storage and no refrigerated truck. The trucks that do have a fridge run it off the engine. So the engine has to keep running, burning diesel, even when the truck is standing still in traffic. A 25 year old engineer decided to take the fridge off the engine. Her name is Shaivee Malik. She studied biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. While she was there she joined the college formula racing team, Axlr8r, and became associate team captain. That is where she learned to build things that actually work, with 2 friends from the same team, Vivek Mahindrakar and Dharmik Bapodara. The 3 of them wanted to work on climate change. They looked around for where the damage was worst and least talked about, and landed on the cold chain. In 2022 they founded a company called Yotuh Energy. The name comes from Sanskrit and refers to the act of cleaning. They registered it in Delhi and then moved to Chennai for an incubation programme at IIT Madras. Their product is a refrigeration unit that runs on its own lithium ion battery, completely independent of the truck engine. That one change does several things at once. The fridge runs whether the engine is on or off, so the truck stops burning diesel while it idles. It keeps working even if the vehicle breaks down. Sensors on the doors detect every time a door opens and adjust the cooling for it. And because it is a separate unit, it can be fitted to an ordinary diesel vehicle or an electric one. It runs 6 to 8 hours on a charge. It cuts refrigeration running costs by around 75%. Each unit avoids somewhere between 3 and 36 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, depending on use. They did not start with money. She has said the first support came from family. After that it was small government grants, 30,000 rupees a month for a year under one scheme, then a larger one, which is what paid for the early prototypes. Then came a funding round of about 1.53 crore rupees, and grants from the agriculture ministry, the science and technology department and others. Their paying customers now include distributors for Amul ice cream and for McCain frozen foods. She is clear about what the company actually is. We are a cooling solutions company, she says. Trucks are just where they started, because a fridge tied to a diesel engine is the least sensible way to keep something cold.