Madhav Pathak: Science fair junkie

Madhav Pathak has made a business of winning science fairs. He's won a trip to the United States, a Pentium 4 computer, a solid gold medal, and Rs 60,000. He has two patents to his name; researchers are working on prototypes of two of his inventions; and, oh, yes, he has a planet named after him. And Pathak is just 17 years old.

Science fairs are no longer about trophies and blue ribbons. Today, they are talent-spotting arenas for venture capitalists, patent lawyers, companies, even military scouts, who make it a point to visit the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the World Cup of these events.

Pathak, the son of a homeopath mother and a surgeon father, got his start in the science fair business at ISEF 2002. He invented "the front-faced Braille slate" to help out his uncle, who is blind. Pathak saw his uncle writing in Braille by punching into a slate with a stylus in reverse and from right to left so the dots stand upward. He modified the Braille slate so his uncle could write in the same direction he reads.

Pathak didn't win a prize at ISEF, but after being voted victor of the first annual Diamond Jubilee Award for Inventions by School Children, instituted by India's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) the same year, his project was patented; now, Rs 200,000 and two years later, he has a working prototype (designed with the help of the research staff he was 'awarded' by CSIR) which he plans to sell to the Indian government.

The ISEF and Diamond Jubilee experiences seem to have made Pathak a science fair junkie.

Such competitions, he says, "motivates us to invent more.'' Last year, he won fourth place in the second edition of CSIR's Diamond Jubilee awards with a project to prevent soiling of railroad tracks. He thought up the idea while traveling on a train from Jabalpur to Pune without a ticket to his name. Afraid of getting caught, he hid in the toilet for almost four hours.

The toilets in Indian trains follow a simple discharge system: on to the tracks. That may be all right in the wilderness, but it creates a problem near stations. In his four hour stay in the train's toilet Pathak envisioned a simple flap attached to the bottom of the discharge pipe that is pushed up by air pressure when the train slows down or stops. India's Western Railway has already approved the invention.

Remember lame model volcanoes (one part vinegar, one part baking soda, if you didn't know) and the stinky brain mock-ups constituted from last night's dinner that were once all you got to see at science fairs? That's what Dr A.K. Bhatnagar, a professor of botany at the University of Delhi expected to see when he started judging science fairs five years ago. Last year, he was a judge at ISEF and he admits that he was wrong. He has seen plant fiber bags as strong as ones made of polythene, a working model of an electronically operated touch-screen for Rs 400 and a home plastic-recycling machine.

Bhatnagar's favourite, however, is a cow-pregnancy-testing kit developed by a boy from Bangalore (the test inmvolves using a cow's urine to germinate seeds of wheat and barley; if the cow is pregnant, fewer seeds germinate). Today, Varun Kumar Nagaraja's project has been patented and is being used by farmers in Karnataka; there are few vets in such regions (only one in five villages has one).

Stories of science projects morphing into business opportunities are legion. But just as common are projects judges find questionable. Cheating happens. Contestants like Nagaraja and Karan Sharma (ISEF 2003) admit it themselves. One judge was so shocked Sharma's glider booster system was built by a schoolchild that he asked him where he downloaded it. (He didn't.)

But skepticism aside, these kids grew up file sharing, crushing videogame aliens and browsing the net. They're at the age when ideas are fungible, and they're thinking big. And four hours hiding in train's bathroom can result in a big idea.

-Sushma Subramanian

INTERVIEW
"We Plan A Push In Consulting''

Bjorn-Erik Willoch is VP with Capgemini and Director of the firm's Global Consulting Services practice, which includes 7,000 professionals and generates Euro 1.2 billion (Rs 6,736 crore) in revenues. On a recent visit to India, he revealed his ambitious plans for Capgemini in India to BT's Priya Srinivasan.

You claim that contrary to popular perception, Capgemini in India is much more than just a back-office operation. Can you elaborate?

One of the reasons I am here is that we have actually shifted our global knowledge management practice here, which basically means that we capture the knowledge from individual projects and then process it to make it available to consultants the world over to supplement consulting assignments.

This is largely back-office stuff. Do you have other plans for India given the expertise you have found here?

I am so impressed with what I have seen so far that we have decided to participate in the February 2005 placement season in top Indian B-schools to recruit graduates that we could actually send on global consulting assignments.

What about the domestic consulting market? You have no presence there.

I am assessing the domestic market. Also if I need to play this market I need to play it with local talent and not expatriates. We definitely plan a big push in domestic consulting as well. We will initially recruit 30-50 consultants and then grow the consulting business out of India.

Another Dog Fight
It's Enemy Ace redux as India's full-service carriers lower fares to combat low-cost airlines.

See the crowd? Well, you soon will

They can deny they are worried, pretend that the lower-than-before fares they have announced are just part of a seasonal promotion, and generally go pink in the face from the effort involved in both, but fact is, executives at India's full-service carriers (read: Jet, Sahara, Indian Airlines) have resorted to the oldest trick in the book to combat the threat of low-cost airlines like Air Deccan-lower prices. And so, Jet has announced a Monsoon Super Apex 30-day advance fare on metro routes (a one-way Delhi-Mumbai ticket would cost Rs 2,500 under the scheme) and special point-to-point fares on other sectors. Indian Airlines has unveiled a Metro Non Metro scheme that allows for travel from a metro to a non-metro (but through another metro) for a mere Rs 1,000 more (a Mumbai-Agra ticket costs over Rs 1,000 less thanks to this). And Sahara has announced discount fares for up to 5 per cent of the seats on most of its flights (a Delhi-Mumbai return ticket would cost Rs 4,444 under the scheme). "All promotional fares we have announced are only valid till mid-October when demand picks up," says Saroj K. Datta, Executive Director, Jet Airways. And Air Sahara's new CEO Rono Dutta says the company's decision was prompted by the fact that air travel in India would take off only when "people were brought out of trains on to planes''. That had better happen fast: if all the low-cost airlines announced in the past few months take wing, capacity on most sectors will increase by at least 50 per cent. "It will be difficult to absorb that sort of capacity even with low fares in such a short time," says Jet's Datta. Well, consumers will enjoy the fruits of war for once.

-Kushan Mitra