In India, brick making is a labour intensive activity, and while machines are used to combine the raw material and make bricks, manual labour is required to pick them up and dry them individually. Satish Kumar (45) from Sonepat, Haryana faced this issue firsthand while running his family-owned brick kiln. Eventually, Kumar and his family had to shut down their business because of the losses they were facing.
“We could not meet demand on time, and the cost of manual labour was too high for us. That’s when I realised that this system needs to be automated — right from mixing raw material to moulding and laying bricks,” says Satish, founder of SnPC Machines. He is a Class X dropout, who believes experience is the only education he needs.
Designing the prototype
Satish spent four years, from 2010 to 2014, coming up with the design of the machine. To get it right, he spoke to engineers and other brick kiln makers…
