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An engineer, Anand Pandey was tired of the rat race and decided to earn his living through his innovations which even won him a couple of awards.
“I have always been interested in experiments. My mother often tells me how I would always do something with electric bulbs and other appliances as a kid. As a result, I got many electric shocks too,” Anand says jovially.
Anand’s interest in education couples with his parents’ support ensured that he got the top ranks. “They would wake me up as early as 4 am and make me tea. I would study and then go to school,” says Anand while recalling those days when his parents would often sleep on empty stomachs as they didn’t have enough to eat.
Anand’s father is a farmer and his mother is a housewife.
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Anand graduated from Rajarshi Rananjay Sinh Institute Of Management & Technology for electronic and communication engineering. He took up a couple of training sessions to hone his skills and later went to Robosapiens India company in Greater Noida to learn how manual robots work. He also underwent training for some time at I Square IT Pune.
By 2013, he managed to build a manual robot and also a model of a driverless metro train. He stood first in his final practical exam in engineering.
He was also awarded the Innovation Award for the metro train by the then-Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav in 2015 and his innovation was also covered by Doordarshan. He started a training centre in Lucknow to train other engineering students to innovate. It is a summer training course that runs for three months during summer vacation in 2014. He managed to gather eight students in the first batch and before lockdown he had 85 students from Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.
He invented a bag that can be converted into a chair. He has managed to sell 1,000 bags so far, with each bag costing Rs 850.
His other innovations include generating electricity from speed breakers and a blood circulator machine that can help people increase or maintain their blood circulation.
Today, he is often invited for guest lectures in various engineering colleges, including IITs where he receives an honorarium.
His training center shut down due to the lockdown and hence Anand thought of inventing a low-cost machine that can make laddus. Anand’s research showed that there were a few similar machines available in the market but they were very expensive — costing more than Rs 8 lakh but just in a year, he managed to make a machine that cost about Rs 3 lakh, including taxes. The machine can produce a quintal of laddus in one hour. He invested about Rs 4 lakh and received a grant of Rs10 lakh from the State Government to make the machine.
Anand made the machine in Kanpur but launched it in his village. So far he has received 20 orders for the machine from Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Jaipur, Haryana, and other states.
Adding that he was inspired by APJ Abdul Kalam, Anand says, “The country that fails to innovate either gets destroyed or becomes a slave for others. I have failed many times in my innovations but I did not lose hope. All the engineers out there should be stubborn to do something different and better in the field of innovation instead of getting a job and living an unaccomplished life.”