Ranga Bodavala was born into an agricultural family in Guntur. Wanted to be an engineer, but his farmer-dad, who is also a trained cost accountant, made the young Ranga do his B.Com. An MBA from Andhra University followed, where Ranga got both his naukri and chokri. He met his better half here. He joined Administrative Staff College of India as faculty almost immediately after his MBA and Ph.D. After teaching for a few years there, he went to Harvard to do a Fellowship in public health. This was followed by a stint at the World Bank, where he spent quite some time in Malawi, Africa and Uzbekistan. Picked up an interesting hobby in Africa, flying. 

During his WB stint he was working with Afghanistan, where they had a project to donate 50,000 solar lamps. A follow up 6 months into the project indicated that most of the lamps had gone kaput. One of his WB bosses challenged Ranga to improve upon the lamp design. Ranga, who like my friend Giri, is a very commerce minded self educated engineer, took up the challenge – and came up with a durable design and then quit his cushy WB job to start Thrive Energy Technologies Pvt Ltd to get into manufacturing these lamps.

The UN, the WB and various governments were customers for his lamps – and over the next decade, he made more than 20 lakh lamps. The irony was that the commerce savvy Ranga had started his business with governments, ended up shutting down his business because of the government. He had more than 20 cr of outstandings with the GoI – which stretched the limits of working capital for his 100 cr company. He sold off a major part of the company, but still retains a skeletal staff of 20 to fulfil the small orders that still keep on coming his way. His interest in tech and electronics still continues. He travels with a backpack that contains 130 gizmos. 

Around the time he was exiting his business, one of his mentors, Almitra Patel, who is an 86 year old MIT educated Parsi  lady, got Ranga appointed as CEO of the Gharda foundation. The foundation supports dozens of schools in Western India – and also runs an engineering and nursing college in Chiplun, where the main factory of Gherda Insecticides is located. Ranga now divides his time between Chiplun, Hyderabad and Mumbai, where the foundation is headquartered.

Lest I forget, his Boston connection is still alive. He has a J1 visa because of a Harvard project that he is doing on mosquitoes. Mosquitoes rely on thermal imaging and CO2 sensing to zero in on the prey. They are quite smart in the sense that if you have a cannister pumping out  CO2, stuff that is installed at Mumbai Airport, it takes them just 5 minutes to figure out the red herring. Ranga tried making an infra red beam mosquito net, and it kind of worked. He also has researched dewinging our flying friends by shooting low powered laser beams at them. The last two solutions can pose liability issues, so they are on the backburner now.

What has taken the front seat is sound. I remember making an ultrasonic mosquito repeller in my school days. What Ranga points out is that constant frequency is filtered out by the smart mosquito. What is required is a range of deviations which mimic sounds that mosquitoes don’t like. So Ranga’s work now is to capture sounds made by frogs, toads, lizards, all of which love having mosquito meals. And surprisingly the male mosquito. That surprised me. Ranga then shared the secret. Like the bees, the female needs the male’s attention only once in her lifetime. (The poor male in any case lives only for a week.) The sperm is stored for the 4-5 times that the female will be laying eggs in her own lifetime of a few months. After job # 1 is done, the males are a nuisance. Am sure females of the homo sapiens species also have similar thoughts.

Ranga’s better half till recently was teaching at ISB. She comes from an academic family – and her dad used to be a prof at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics half a century ago. The daughter, after finishing her economics graduation at Central University in Hyderabad, has shifted on full scholarship to U Penn to study law. The son works with an ed-tech startup during the day – and is a General in the Warcraft army after work hours. And Ranga is about to publish a very interesting book – ‘How to fail successfully.’ where he talks about a lot of experiences in his life About how a purchase manager put a cheap inductor in a circuit to get bribed by Rs. 2 per inductor – and that cost a company its future. About how the Chinese don’t cheat and how the Pakistanis have literally corrupted Afghanistan culture. And interestingly, a cheatsheet on surviving kidnapping. For, our friend has been held hostage in places as far as Andhra by Naxalites and Talibans in Afghanistan. 

Dr. Bodavala (Ranga) has 16 years of experience as a consultant in public health systems in World Bank-funded health projects in India, JICA funded projects in Uzbekistan, Malawi, and UNICEF in Afghanistan. Hailing from an agricultural family and from a village in India, Ranga is interested in simple technologies that make the life of women and children better, safe and productive. The technologies range from water treatment, pumping and communication to home lighting. Ranga has an MBA and PhD in information systems, and was a Takemi Fellow in Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, from 1999-2000.

He founded THRIVE (Volunteers for Rural Health, Education, and Information Technology) and a commercial company Thrive Energy Technologies Pvt. Ltd. to pioneer the development and deployment of portable Solar LED home lights in India, Africa, and Latin America through continuous improvements in materials, cost reduction, improved functional benefits and financial modeling.