With $18 million funding, IIT Madras professor breaks the glass ceiling


Amrit water filter will soon dot many locations across the world where arsenic is a problem.

“I am glad that technologies from academic labs are getting venture funding in units of millions of dollars,” says Prof. T. Pradeep from the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. It was only a couple of days ago that he signed the final agreement with Nanoholdings based in Connecticut, U.S. wherein Nanoholdings will provide his team venture funding of $18 million (about Rs.120 crore) to further develop its nanomaterials-based water technology that is currently used in India to remove arsenic from drinking water.

For a person whose first research grant in 1994 was a meagre Rs.42,000 and slowly graduated to being funded in the range of Rs.2-3 lakhs, and the licensing fee from the first product (to remove pesticides from drinking water) he developed fetched him just Rs.3 lakhs, the bonanza funding is proof that researchers in India, especially in institutes such as IITs can dream and achieve big....................Read more

 

Source: The Hindu


Comments (0)



Please Login or Register to join groups