Nav Sawhney is only 28 years old, London born who is an engineer by profession. He made a trip to Kuilapalayam, a village in Pondicherry, got a reality check by watching women washing clothes with their bare hands. This motivated Nav to do something for women and invent the manual washing machine, which saves time and is also water efficient. In 2016, Sawhney took a break from his job and joined a UK-based charity- Engineers Without Borders where he was providing clean and efficient chullas as an assigned project to people in villages of Pondicherry.
It was during his stay in the village, he noticed that his neighbors did not have access to electricity and spend multiple hours to do chores, which merely took minutes to get done back at his home with advanced appliances.
During his stay in the village, he got associated with a lady named Divya, where it actually made his mind boggle to see how she washed the entire family?s clothes for hours together. While chatting up with her, she mentioned that due to hours of washing clothes, it was causing her serious back pain.
Sawhney came to realization that other households had the same story. He conducted a 10 question survey, he asked questions such as the detergents they used, the number of clothes per day and the electricity available at their place. Such questions would help Nav to come forth with an idea to build his invention.
From his survey, he found out that women end up spending 20 hours per week washing clothes and waste 40 liters of water in the process. With all this information put together, along with an itch to help the needy ones, Sawhney developed the idea of making a manual washing machine.
After finishing his clean chulla project, Sawhney returned to London. He worked meticulously on his plan and developed a hand-cranked washing machine which can wash 10 kgs of clothes per cycle.
A conventional washing machine has the ability to wash 7.5 kg to 12 kgs clothes. The self-made washing machine has three types of wash: wash phase, clean phase, and a dry phase. And the entire washing process would take only 15 mins, Sawhney said.
The manual washing machine will only consume 10 liters of water to complete a cycle of washing.
Once the prototype was complete, the United Nations helped Sawhney and his team to pilot their manual washing machine in various IDP (internally displaced people) camps in Iraq. ?We took our prototype and installed it in the camps to test the washing machine and garner feedback.
The price was fixed at $ 35 or Rs 2,400, which is one-fourth the price of a standard washing machine in India.
Sawhney had decided that after returning to Mumbai he would gift his first invention to Divya.
" />Nav Sawhney is only 28 years old, London born who is an engineer by profession. He made a trip to Kuilapalayam, a village in Pondicherry, got a reality check by watching women washing clothes with their bare hands. This motivated Nav to do something for women and invent the manual washing machine, which saves time and is also water efficient. In 2016, Sawhney took a break from his job and joined a UK-based charity- Engineers Without Borders where he was providing clean and efficient chullas as an assigned project to people in villages of Pondicherry.
It was during his stay in the village, he noticed that his neighbors did not have access to electricity and spend multiple hours to do chores, which merely took minutes to get done back at his home with advanced appliances.
During his stay in the village, he got associated with a lady named Divya, where it actually made his mind boggle to see how she washed the entire family?s clothes for hours together. While chatting up with her, she mentioned that due to hours of washing clothes, it was causing her serious back pain.
Sawhney came to realization that other households had the same story. He conducted a 10 question survey, he asked questions such as the detergents they used, the number of clothes per day and the electricity available at their place. Such questions would help Nav to come forth with an idea to build his invention.
From his survey, he found out that women end up spending 20 hours per week washing clothes and waste 40 liters of water in the process. With all this information put together, along with an itch to help the needy ones, Sawhney developed the idea of making a manual washing machine.
After finishing his clean chulla project, Sawhney returned to London. He worked meticulously on his plan and developed a hand-cranked washing machine which can wash 10 kgs of clothes per cycle.
A conventional washing machine has the ability to wash 7.5 kg to 12 kgs clothes. The self-made washing machine has three types of wash: wash phase, clean phase, and a dry phase. And the entire washing process would take only 15 mins, Sawhney said.
The manual washing machine will only consume 10 liters of water to complete a cycle of washing.
Once the prototype was complete, the United Nations helped Sawhney and his team to pilot their manual washing machine in various IDP (internally displaced people) camps in Iraq. ?We took our prototype and installed it in the camps to test the washing machine and garner feedback.
The price was fixed at $ 35 or Rs 2,400, which is one-fourth the price of a standard washing machine in India.
Sawhney had decided that after returning to Mumbai he would gift his first invention to Divya.
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