Meet Bandicoot, a robot that's on a mission to eradicate manual scavenging

Bandicoot is on a safai mission in India. Here's his story

They are young, enthusiastic and engineers. Like all other students, they registered their startup in the entrepreneurship cell of their college in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. However, paucity of funds and uncertainty of future, led them to take up jobs at MNCs — considered a safer bet by their concerned parents. Sounds like a familiar story? There’s a slight difference in this story of budding engineers, though.

What started as a passion for robotics during college days, gave birth to a full-fledged startup called Genrobotics Innovations Pvt Ltd. “We were working on several aspects of robotics during our college days. Some of our robotics work — which was basically supporting human labour through machines — got us accreditation from across countries like Singapore, Taiwan, and even the American Society for Research,” says one of the founding members of Genrobotics, Vimal Govind, as he heads back to Kerala after an almost successful meeting with the Prime Minister’s office in Delhi.

Impressed with their work in college, the state government in Kerala contacted them to find a robotic solution to manual scavenging. “The government had contacted several other start-ups but not many were able to take up such a task. For us, it meant intermixing our passion and working towards a cause,” says Vimal. However, with a full-time job, concentrating on a government task seemed tough. “Of the nine people who formed Genrobotics in college, first four of us quit our jobs and started working on a prototype,” adds Vimal, “ but to work on anything, we first needed to understand the role of manual scavengers.” 
 

Several rounds of interviews and surveys with local scavengers in Kerala led them to believe that those people were in dire need of a machine that could do their task. A task that required getting in the manhole and cleaning it. “We had to go through engineering details of different manholes, and the types of activities that are done by the scavengers,” says Vimal adding that “we were not looking at taking away their jobs but only ensuring a safer way to help them ease their task”.

Talking about manual scavenging in India, the enthusiastic voice of Vimal takes a sad tone. “We were appalled to see how the manual scavengers worked without being bothered about their safety”. There are an estimated 1.8 lakh people in the country working as manual scavengers. Over the last three years, there have been over 300 manhole deaths in India. Seven workers died in Mumbai and Bengaluru in January 2018 alone.

“It is not the technology that is required by us. But the technique. About seven months ago, we designed a prototype and tested it in our labs — idea was that it should be able to clean manholes like how manual scavengers do. Once it was successful, we launched the beta prototype in the end of February and it is being run as a pilot project in Kerala,” says Vimal.

The robot Bandicoot has an attachment that open the lids of the manhole using a magnet. This way, workers do not have to lift heavy lids. It also has a camera that helps monitor the manhole on the operating screen — an iPad-like touchscreen control system that makes it easy to control for even those who aren’t tech-savvy. “We have been training the manual scavengers on how to use the system,” says Vimal.

The Kerala government has even offered the support of public sector undertakings in helping them manufacture more robots that will be then used across the state. “The feedback the workers have given us has motivated us to work harder on building more robots,” says Vimal adding, “we are meeting all stakeholders across the country and trying to establish Bandicoot as a nationwide project soon”.

Now they are neither afraid of losing nor afraid of what their parents will say, all they want is to focus on building more robots and ease the work of manual scavengers. “We have to provide around 14 robots in Kerala on a pilot basis,” says Vimal hoping that soon they will be able to set up a meeting with the Prime Minister and be a part of his ambitious Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Will involving PSUs harm their manufacturing of the robot in any way? Not at all, says Vimal, adding that the PSUs will help in handling things on a large-scale basis which at present they cannot. Will Bandicoot be able to wipe out a century-old menace from India? Only time will tell.