Innovators Under 35
INNOVATIVE Humanitarians
H3. Katherine Taylor, 28
Khethworks
Her simple water pump could transform
the lives of millions of farmers in India.
Irrigation
shouldn’t be a problem for the 30 million small farms in the water-rich Ganges
River basin in eastern India. But today most farmers have to choose between
cultivating a single crop each year during the monsoon rains and spending up to
90 percent of their profits to hire diesel or kerosene pumps during the dry
seasons to access the plentiful, shallow groundwater.
Most
plots stay uncultivated; to make up the income, farmers often resort to
dangerous and demeaning migratory labor in diamond mines or clothing factories,
leaving their families for months at a time.
This
is what motivated engineer Katherine Taylor to uproot her life in the U.S. and
move to India to found Khethworks, which builds an affordable solar-powered irrigation
system that lets farmers cultivate year-round.
“Sometimes
I get asked if I would have wanted a job at a high-tech company instead. But
this was never a sacrifice for me, it was always the goal,” says Taylor. “The
potential for keeping families together, for having people doing work they feel
is dignified—it’s those kinds of stories we want to enable.”
Originally,
as part of the mechanical engineering master’s program at MIT, Taylor focused
on developing low-pressure drip irrigation systems, but during a visit to
India, farmers helped her spot the real gap in the market. “They said, look,
drip is great, but what we need is an affordable pump,” she says. “Who cares
about drip if we can’t afford to irrigate year-round?”
In
response, she and Khethworks cofounders Victor Lesniewski and Kevin Simon
designed a centrifugal pump with triple the efficiency of similar-size pumps.
That meant it could be powered by one-third as many photovoltaic panels—by far
the most expensive component. This reduces the cost and makes the system
portable so farmers can rent it out.
Taylor
and Lesniewski moved to Pune in 2016 and will ship their first commercial
product next spring.
Not
that it’s been easy. Endless red tape has been frustrating, she says, and
they’ve had to adapt to a business culture with a different attitude toward
deadlines. “The most important thing is having a good sense of humor,” she
says. But Taylor nevertheless believes it’s “absurd” that bigger players
haven’t been designing for these farmers.
Going
after these customers means Taylor and her cofounders haven’t been able to
stick to the standard advice for startups to focus on core competencies. It’s
likely they’ll have to do everything from engineering to developing
distribution models. “You don’t necessarily have the luxury of doing exactly
what you think you’re best at,” says Taylor.
—Edd Gent
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
No comments:
Post a Comment