• With the support of IIT Roorkee and Heal Agnostic Innovations Pvt, the duo has produced 1000 litres of sanitizers
• They have distributed it free of cost to the IIT Roorkee community, hospitals, and municipal corporation 
• To avoid plastic bottle disposal resulting in plastic waste, refilling stations have been installed inside the IIT Roorkee campus 

In an endeavor to limit the transmission risk of Covid-19 and promote essential hygiene factors, two researchers of IIT Roorkee,  Siddharth Sharma, and Vaibhav Jain set a milestone like many others in assisting India to battle against Covid-19 by developing herbal hand sanitizers and justified that our youth possess many powerful potentialities.

Measures such as social distancing, wearing masks, and sanitizing hands have become the ‘new normal' amidst COVID pandemic and until there is any specific development of treatment or vaccines, sanitizers are going to remain the essential part of an individual’s daily routine, even in the post-pandemic era. Keeping in mind the factors, the young duo along with their professors and few other students developed the hand sanitizers by following the guidelines laid by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with a significant goal to help the society to have a common good.

Speaking to the Machine Maker, Siddharth Sharma shared, “IIT Roorkee campus resembles a small township which comprises many teaching, non-teaching staff, and students. In the view of COVID, we observed much staff including the gardeners, securities, gatekeepers, etc performing their duties 24/7 without having access to proper sanitary kit and consequently, we thought of providing them with sanitizers to maintain primary safety, and this functioned as one of the reasons behind the development of hand sanitizers”.

After completing MTech in Bio-medical engineering, Siddharth joined IIT Roorkee as a research scholar in the Centre of Nanotechnology and simultaneously Vaibhav Jain joined the Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Department. Siddharth is also the co-founder of a start-up, Heal Agnostic Innovations Private Limited along with Dr. Debrupa Lahiri and Indranil Lahiri (Associate Professors in Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, IIT Roorkee) which is incubated with IIT Roorkee.

Development of Herbal Sanitizer

The entire story began when WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic and it gradually started spreading in India. Mostly, all of us were unaware of the unprecedented circumstance and with its emergence in the country we all panicked and crowded the medical stores to purchase sanitizers and masks in order to follow the fundamental safety measures, likewise, Siddharth was among one of us who went to the market to purchase hand sanitizers and encountered the fact that it was being sold at an elevated price because of the sudden demand and most of the sanitizers were made locally as they possessed a poor quality. Later, he even observed the non-teaching staff working day and night without proper sanitary kits and immediately felt the urge to take a shot at this issue to stand by them as well as the society.

Initially, Siddharth and Vaibhav came out with the idea to develop hand sanitizers which they further discussed with their Executive Professors Dr. Debrupa Lahiri and Indranil Lahiri and they came out with a collective decision to conduct certain biological tests in the lab. He referenced the after-effects of the tests to be very promising and they proceeded with their development procedure with the help of a few other students and finally accomplished the desired outcome.

For almost 25 days we distributed the sanitizers among our lab mates and guided them to use it 4-5 times a day or whenever going outside so that we can conclude if it has any other skin reaction or not. However, we received a very good response from all of them and it was an imperative achievement for us 

Siddharth Sharma
Researcher, IIT Roorkee
 

Further, Heals Agnostic Innovations Private Limited came into the scenario, with the assistance of which they prepared almost 150 litres of sanitizers and divided that into 100 ml bottle each, which they distributed to the IIT Roorkee community free of cost.“This task wouldn’t have been possible without the help of few other students including Satish Jaiswal, Rajesh, Dibyanshu Lahiri, Anshu, Souvik Ghosh, Nitam and Vishal. They constantly buckled down all through the turns of events, from preparation to distribution”, says Siddharth.

We all are familiar with alcohol-based hand sanitizers which are quite effective to kill bacteria and viruses within a few seconds. Nonetheless, Siddharth specifies that mostly the sanitizers available in the market nowadays are only a blend of alcohol and water which doesn't satisfy each parameter as per the standard. “After studying thoroughly about the components of sanitizers, we concluded that alcohol even makes the hands dry, therefore, though our hand sanitizers comprise 75% alcohol (isopropanol/ethanol) we used some moisturizing agents along with few other herbal anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-inflammatory agents in it. With the use of it, the efficiency of killing bacteria increases, and the hands get moisturized,” he mentioned.

Support from IIT Roorkee

Considering the progress students made by developing the hand sanitizers, IIT Roorkee started funding in the project for the community welfare and with the back support of them, they developed more than 1000 litres of sanitizers which they distributed free of cost in many places including military hospitals of Roorkee, Roorkee Municipal Corporation and so forth.

The dispersion in plastic bottles appeared as another trouble since people were not re-using them and simply disposing of once the bottle got empty, it led to the generation of plastic waste. Therefore to overcome that situation the team came up with filling stations on the campus of IIT Roorkee, where people can easily come and refill the bottles with sanitizing solutions.

Siddharth informed that they are in the process of getting a manufacturing license to commercialize the product, however, he emphasized that their primary goal will remain helping the society instead of making money. Currently, they are even trying to find solutions for making disinfectants, used in hospitals.

For more details contact: http://www.healagnosticinnovations.tech/