Three IIT-KGP students Vivek Pandey, Prateek Singhal and Devendra Gupta have developed arevolutionizing cold storage system, which works at no recurring cost, to save agricultural products from perishing in India. Developed and nurtured at the Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Park (STEP) of IIT-Kharagpur, the micro-cold storage system has been tested and proved a runaway success in Karnataka.

In an agrarian country like India, perishability of agricultural produce is of utmost concern. The existing storage facilities are not enough to address it for all farmers, since the big/middle ones usurp the cold storages to hoard goods. Now, with help from this technology, the small farmers can save their goods from perishing, and at almost zero running cost.

Ecofrost storage runs on solar energy, which is clean and green. There is 36 hours of back up using thermal storage. It is portable, unlike the existing storages; so any farmer can rent it out when he is not using it. The different sensors used in the storage updates farmers on the condition of storage, which can be monitored by farmers with the app on their phones, as well as by the customer care personnel of the company responsible for running it. They alert the farmers when something goes wrong with the storage system, thus making this system work on collaboration.

This pioneering technology has been awarded both at home and abroad for its path-breaking vision for social upliftment.