October 19,1998

Helped by a government funding programme, scientists show how the wildest of ideas can become moneyspinners.

By Subhadra Menon

Subita Srimal earns her livelihood by extracting blood from a horseshoe crab-an ancient creature that has outlived the dinosaurs and almost anything else on earth. Wild way to make a living. But it only sounds bizarre because India hasn't exactly been fertile ground for sowing the seeds of ideas that push the frontiers of imagination, science and your bank balance-in that order.

In her sterile Bangalore laboratory, Srimal, a 42-year-old biochemist, has standardised a process to fashion a reagent-a chemical substance that's used to check drips and syrups for contamination-from the blood cells of the horseshoe crab. It's a replacement for costly imports and a potential goldmine for her new company Manukirti Biogems.

It all began when Srimal did a PhD four years ago. She studied how the blood of the horseshoe crab coagulated. That's as arcane a PhD topic as any of the thousands that emerge from India's universities, but financially few of them ever lead to anything more than a piffling grant for further research. Making a living from a PhD idea? Unheard of.

Until now. The day of the dreamer is at hand. Srimal is one of this breed-running a business through their scientific vision. She represents the flowering of a hitherto unseen scientific entrepreneurship. India has always had prodigious thinkers, the Chandrashekhars, the Ramans, but it has always lacked the doers, the Thomas Edisons, the Alexander Graham Bells. Now in the nooks and crannies of the country, there is a profusion of doers who are making their ideas work: a chemical engineer in Hyderabad who makes benign biofertilisers from maize and wheat waste; an engineer in Chennai who makes bright coloured sheets of leather from discarded leather. The list is endless.

It is a small but remarkable achievement in a country where science is notorious for not moving out from books and labs, where a scientific entrepreneur is as rare as a honest politician. It is, above all, a harbinger, a glimpse of what could be. Importantly, these dreamers are getting that crucial input: money. And this support to translate their scientific fancies into business reality is, remarkably, coming from the government. "There are so many people with great ideas but with little access to science and technology," says V.S. Ramamurthy, secretary in the Department of Science and Technology (DST). "Somebody had to go out there and provide that access, bridge that gap." That gap, for many, has been bridged by a fledgling venture of the DST called the Technology Development Board (TDB). Since it was set up in 1996, the TDB has handed out over Rs 66 crore to fund 28 such scientific-business visions; another 23 are on the anvil.

It's been a long, hard road to success though. Hyderabad-based electronics engineer K.I. Varaprasad Reddy, architect of India's first genetically engineered Hepatitis B vaccine, still remembers the days he tried to sell batteries to the Indian Air Force after walking out of his eight-year-old job as a defence scientist. He suffered the ignominy of his partner cheating him. From seemingly aimless trips abroad to friends and relatives, the blueprint of the vaccine programme emerged-but no one was willing to put up any money.

Finally, when Reddy sold family property, managed a grant from, get this, the government of Oman, the TDB stepped in, financing his Shanta Biotechnics with two loans. Today, his indigenous vaccine, Shanvac B, is a third cheaper than imported vaccines. Launched barely a year ago, it has already given Reddy a healthy profit and also enabled him to return Rs 10 lakh to the TDB as royalty.

Srimal too couldn't make much headway with banks. "They couldn't really understand a biochemist's problems and would talk only hard money," she says. But after two years of frustrations her project took off with funds from the TDB.

In Secunderabad, chemical engineer K.V.S.S. Sairam, 32, is today managing director of Prathista Industries Ltd. The company began test runs of an innovative biofertiliser-made from natural plant proteins-in May this year. Last month it began large-scale commercial manufacture of the product. Sairam managed to upscale a simple technique that he and his colleagues developed while he was an ordinary Joe at Patiala. He learnt to convert maize and wheat waste into an eco-friendly fertiliser. "It is the ideal wealth-from-waste kind of project," says S.B. Krishnan, member secretary, TDB.

Jagannath Rao also found his wealth in waste. The Chennai-based engineer makes shiny new shoes and jackets from waste leather. When hide is removed from cows or buffaloes, it is about 4-8 mm thick, but leather eventually used in making shoes and garments is hardly 2 mm thick. This is split from raw hide and the rest-called split leather-is generally discarded or put to very low-grade use. Rao has managed to give this waste leather a synthetic finish with a chemical called indirect polyurethane. The result is colourful, useable leather. Rao has now tied up with Bata to use his old-new leather. His company, Amalgam Leather, has put out some 10,000 pairs of shoes in Chennai stores.

So the ideas do work. But here's the ultimate test: can they make money? Rao's company seems to be doing well. Having invested a little over Rs 10 crore in the pilot and commercial plant phases, the company has already registered a Rs 25 lakh annual profit from pilot plant sales alone. "Our product is 40 per cent cheaper than normal grain leather and has the look and feel of top-grade leather," says Rao, confident of retailing his shoes at premium stores across the country.

The confidence is echoed by Sairam. Ploughing in Rs 1 crore into the first phase of operations, his company has managed, in just five months, a profit of Rs 12 lakh. It has also put aside Rs 45 lakh for an in-house research and development facility. "Ours is a competitive market, but once the farmer notices the goodness of our product, these profits will rise," says Sairam. His biofertiliser Suryamin can increase crop yields by 30 per cent. However, profits have yet to pour in at Srimal's reagent unit in Bangalore. She has invested around Rs 25 lakh and hopes to break even within a year. Her product-at Rs 1,000 for 10 tests-is about 60 per cent cheaper than available foreign reagents for the same tests. Getting the right guidance at the right time and, most importantly, the funds, these scientists-cum-business people are actually making profits.

Clearly, everyone-the government and the scientists-is on a learning curve. Making good market sense out of science is relatively new in India which is where the DST comes in. "We are here to provide continuing support, not just financial but also advice and direction," says Ramamurthy. That is just what the TDB does. Among young entrepreneurs and larger industrial groups the feeling is "here is someone who can help me". What's more, the board does not always reject an idea that does not seem to work at the first instance. "If there is a premature idea we send the entrepreneur to another window within the department for further assistance," says Krishnan. The board's strengths, most entrepreneurs feel, are rapid decision-making, an ability to take risks with new projects and efficient project appraisal by some of the country's top scientists.

Still, there's a downside. "It's just that it came a decade too late," laments R.A. Mashelkar, director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He's not far off the mark. The idea was first mooted in 1986 by the then Rajiv Gandhi government. It's taken all of a decade for it to come to fruition. Today, the TDB has even started earning royalties from the money it has lent out. And with the TDB showing the way, the confidence level at institutions such as the State Bank of India, ICICI and IDBI has also gone up and now all offer additional funding to the board's projects.

Having cleared the money hurdle, the dreamers now look ahead. At Prathista,Sairam wants to develop at least one new product each year. In Bangalore, Srimal wants to develop diagnostic reagents that are relevant to the diseases in our country. At the TDB an array of projects now await clearance: rural wireless telephones, power cables, enhanced motor vehicle engines, drug intermediates, diesel engines and silicon wafers. And yet, there is a need to look beyond. Much of this research is still innovation or an Indianisation of processes well known globally. Mashelkar explains: "It is important to have different levels of science. Once we reach a certain level, we will certainly raise the benchmarks." That will really be the day of the dreamers.

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