 Hello and welcome to this new series OISOM Extended. We started with talking inside OISOM, we spoke about a few members and that's what drove me to think of talking about few people in the field of environment, in the field of air quality and also some achievers over the period of time. We wanted to share some stories and how we have been working so far with them. So this series OISOM Extended tends to bring out those stories in front of you. So today in our first episode, I am honored to welcome Dr. Srikanth Sola. He is the CEO and co-founder of Devik Earth and he's also a cardiologist. So I know you must be having a lot of questions. So without wasting any time, let me welcome Dr. Sola and hear what he has been doing so far with Devik Earth and his stories so far. So welcome Dr. Sola. Thanks Ayan. It's a pleasure to be here. Dr. Sola, would you please help us understand how this idea of Devik Earth came around and your experience as far as as a cardiologist, how did you come up with something like this and just explain about what Devik Earth does? Sure, sure, sure. So Devik Earth is a green tech company. We specialize in novel equipment that helps to improve air quality over large areas. So unlike say air purifiers and other approaches, our system uses pulsed radio waves, pulsed Wi-Fi to improve air quality. This came to me actually back in 2008. I was a cardiologist who had moved from the United States to India. I wanted to come back and serve my mother country and what I found, I was working at the Satya Sai Hospital in Bangalore. It's a charity hospital. All the patients are treated for free and we treat primarily the poor lower economic status of society. I was seeing too many patients with heart attacks due to air pollution. I had read about this in my textbooks. I had heard about this in medical conferences. I myself have spoken at so many conferences and was aware of the link between air pollution and heart disease. But I never seen it so often as I had right from literally my first week. And it occurred to me, you know, when we open up a blockage, when somebody gets a heart attack, it's because they have a block in their heart. And when we do an angioplasty operation or bypass operation, we can, you know, clear those blockages or bypass the blockage. But, you know, as a cardiologist, how many angioplasty operations can I do, you know, to serve the larger population? Literally, I think at that time it was 7 million deaths per year. It's just a drop in the bucket really. 7 million deaths due to air pollution, which 50% are due to heart disease. That's the data. And I realize, man, I mean, it's what I'm doing is great, but it's not affecting the larger population. Luckily, I had a great background in the US in biomedical engineering. I done a lot of work with big companies like Philips and GE Healthcare, Siemens, other companies. And in fact, some of the products that I helped to develop the new technologies are still in use and are now involved in, I think, hundreds of thousands of patients every year around the world. So I knew how to work, you know, how to make new things. As a cardiologist, I was also doing MRI at the heart, which is pulsed radio waves. And that's where the idea of can we use pulsed radio waves to improve air quality? How does it work? You know what happens in nature? Like we've been in lockdown for a while. We don't go out and wash our cars or two wheelers anymore. So what happens is after a few days, you'll see a layer of dust on your vehicle. In nature, what happens is those dust particles, we can call them pollutant particles, they have small charges, positive and negative charges, just like the magnets that we have in our school of physics labs. And they collide together. And then because of increased weight, they settle down. And if your car is in the way or your two wheeler, they settle onto your car. And that happens with the visible dust that we see. But it also happens with the microscopic dust that we cannot see. But what scientists call PM 10 and PM 2.5 particles that are just 10 or two and a half microns in size, 40 times smaller than the size of your hair. And that's what goes into the body and what's causing all these heart attacks in patients. So I thought, well, can we speed up this process? And it turns out that because these dust particles or rather these pollutant particles are already charged, if we can apply an additional charge, then we can speed them up. And that's how the idea of using pulse to radio waves came about because a continuous radio wave like what you have in your Wi-Fi, that's a continuous energy Wi-Fi, TV, radio, cell phone and all that. But pulse to radio waves has this ability to increase the amount of charges on certain types of particles. The good news for us is that it only affects the smallest particles, anything less than 20 microns in diameter. So we're clearing away certain pollutant particles. And we're also able to clear away certain gaseous pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which often make up what we call secondary PMs. Not PM as in prime minister, but secondary PM as in pollutant as in micro particles. So that's how our technology works. That's totally impressive. I mean, it's great how your journey has been like from what you were just saying back in the US and now here. So it's wonderful to listen to everything. So tell me something like this is relatively a newer concept here in India. So how challenging has it been like as far as the acceptance is considered and how has it been like when you compared to any conventional methods for this? Sure. Any new technology will have its challenges. It takes a while to get accepted. I have 40 plus publications in peer reviewed scientific journals. I served as an editor reviewer on many peer reviewed scientific journals myself. We want to see peer reviewed publications and so forth. It takes time to do that. The good news is that the data has been very, very strong. And you know, people say, Dr. Srikant, you started this in 2008, but David Earth didn't start till 2018. What were you doing all that time? And I said, well, you know, first of all, I was a cardiologist. Second is, you know, as a physician, I've seen a lot of promising technologies come and go. And so it took me 10 years to make sure. Number one, it's effective. Number two, it's safe. And number three, it has to work under all sorts of conditions. So it has to be robust, right? And so that took a while. And then what was happening is I realized we actually had hard data from the hospital where I was working at showing that when our system was on compared to days when it was off, the number of people from the surrounding communities who are coming to the hospital with asthma exacerbations, heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots, they actually dropped by as much as 30 or 40%. And I thought, man, there's no medicine or procedure I can do that will make such a huge difference on literally at that time, lacks and lacks of people every single day. And that's what pushed me to move out of taking care of the heart to, to something much larger. That's great. I understand and there could be some portions with as a technology, it makes a little challenging for people to accept. But I think you coming from medical fraternity makes it more, you know, gain that trust. And I think that makes it right. I mean, we had a wonderful project at IIT Kanpur recently, the national aerosol lab, which tested the technology under very formal conditions. And it showed exactly what I had just now explained, gluten particles, micro pollutants floating around in the, in the seal chamber, you apply the technology, the charge increases, they accelerate their agglomeration, and they settle down faster. And that's what we're doing. And, and, you know, the papers on this will come about very shortly in, in the journals, but it's just wonderful when you see it work in the field, when you turn it on at a customer site and you see pollution come down by 40, 50, 60, 70%. And we're talking heavy industries, steel plants, cement, thermal power. We've even done a bunch of marathons. And the funnest I think was a Guruji satsang in the Himalayas before the pandemic started, you know, 2000, 3000 people coming every day to Rishikesh for an ashram and they want to clean air to breathe. So we get to work with all sorts of people and that makes it a lot of fun. Okay, that's impressive. I mean, that's, wow, it's fascinating to hear, you know, the application and how the results are coming. So, Dr. Sola, I wanted to ask you something like you have seen the lockdown and the impacts that it has on the air pollution, right? There have been several studies, which have been highlighting how it has reduced drastically. There are a lot of moments, a lot of things. So, as a country in India, I mean, again, when you know, the lockdown gets lifted, you see there are certain spikes sometimes, and it again goes back to the trend. Do you feel that there are some policy level changes that we need to make overall to reduce the air pollution impact? So what are your thoughts on that? Yes, you know, we always say that whenever you have a problem, you should don't just throw technology at it. The first thing is to, in the case of air pollution, is to reduce pollution at the source. You know, whether that means increasing renewable energy generation, reducing pollution that comes from factories, having more efficient transportation, perhaps electric vehicles, you know, different things can work, but even better solid waste management will make a difference in air quality. But what we need is science-based policy decisions. And for that, we need good data on air quality. And that's where, you know, companies like OISOM comes into play because we need that data to guide these kind of policy decisions. And then, when necessary, these two technologies like OISOM and David Earth can be placed together to provide that additional remediation wherever it's needed. Now, there are also some other situations where it doesn't matter what kind of policies you have, pollution is going to be bad. Take, for example, the annual California wildfires in the western coast of the United States. And it's probably made worse because of climate change. That's what our scientists are telling us. And I think that's true. But that's something where technology can play a huge role to provide air quality, better air quality for millions. That's absolutely correct and well put. I mean, definitely yes, technology can play a part. But again, this has to be a lot of policy-level decisions. Yes, the focus will always be on reducing pollution at the source. And that should be the way. Yes. So now, let me just focus on your company. I've seen a lot of new trends coming on the social media, you guys having some fright upon. So tell me, how has it changed like after the lockdown and pre-lockdown? We all have been doing this work from home thing. And how has the culture adapted? What has been your experience with this? Yes, I think when you look, if you talk to most CEOs, one of the things that they're going to work on, they're going to work on revenue generation, because you have to keep the company afloat. They're going to work on the product, the technology. And that's a big part of my work as well. They're going to work on strategy. But the fourth thing, which is really important, is the team and building that team culture, hiring people whose values fit the company values and testing them during the recruitment process to make sure they fit your cultural values. So we are very clear about what our values are. And then building that cohesiveness through different types of activities that help to bring that camaraderie. I think one of the things that I love about working with the team at David Gehrth is that we're also passionate about what we do. We know that we have a technology that has the potential to benefit millions of lives, and that really drives us to work as a unit every day. I think that's great to come from some leadership to the same thought. And then you see the entire team joining with the passion. And I totally agree. I mean, passion is something that is very important when it comes to working on such a crucial aspect. So I think that's great. So before we wind up this quick interview, I want to know from you, what's next for David Gehrth? What are you seeing in the future? Where do you see these technologies being used as an application in India or maybe in the world? What's your vision? Sure. I grew up in the United States. My institutions like Stanford and these kind of places. I worked at top hospitals like the Cleveland Clinic. I've always been at the best of the best. And my goal is to make David Gehrth the global leading green technology company within the next five years. What we have done for air pollution, we've already tested and proven for water pollution. And we're looking forward to rolling that out later in the year. But there are a lot of really exciting applications for this tech. We've had inquiries from metro cars to improve air quality within the metros. We've had inquiries from NASA saying, look, we are putting a lunar spacecraft on the moon in 2025. And what happens is when these spacecraft land on the surface of the moon, there's a lot of lunar dust, remnants of old asteroids and meters, but it's not gone through any kind of weathering. It's very abrasive. And the moon's gravity is only one sixth of that of the earth. So once that spacecraft lands, that dust kicks up and then it tends to float around as it orbits near the surface of the moon. And then it causes instrument failure or malfunction. This is what happened to ISRO's Chandrayaan machine two years ago, the same thing. And it's been a problem. So NASA is looking at ways to incorporate this kind of technology into their next mission. That's really fun. The challenge, of course, is that for NASA, every single gram counts. So we have to take what is very robust and very strong and very, you know, has a very high uptown time and make it jump like this into a very small, lightweight size. But that's fun. That's a lot of that. That must be exciting. I'm getting goosebumps, you know, imagining the entire thing deploying at the moon. And that's fantastic. I mean, that should be great. I mean, Dr. Sola, this, this was fun, you know, knowing about your vision and your so far about David Cut. So any final comments before we wrap up anything you want to share with the youngsters or anything watching this video? I think find a great team. If you have a great team, you will succeed wherever you go, whatever you're interested in, and don't leave that team, make a be part of a great team and make that team better. Yeah, I think that's the best way to put it, what you guys must be listening to. So thank you so much, Dr. Sola, for your time. This was, this was fun. This was fantastic. And I hope we have these interactions more often. Thanks, my pleasure. So, guys, this was Dr. Srikanth Sola from David Cut. Look forward to our websites from David Cut as well as Ozone. We have been doing some projects together and we've been deploying our solutions together. And this has just given us some wonderful results. If you have any queries about the technology, you can hit up to Dr. Sola or you can ask me, anyone and we will be happy to connect to you. So, this was the first episode of Ozone Extended. We'll be coming up with more such episodes. Thank you. Stay safe and stay happy.