For 21-year-old K Mohan, innovation has always been a part of life. A final year electronics and instrumentation engineering student from SRM University, Chennai, Mohan is the recipient of six national awards and seven state awards for pioneering innovation in various fields. This time Mohan has come up with an automatic dosa-making machine that can make as many as 1,200 dosas in an hour! “Most students who live in hostels suffer as the quality of food is sub-standard. As a result, I came up with the idea of building a automatic dosa-making machine. I should thank my hostel mess for inspiring me as necessity has definitely been the mother of my invention!”
The machine weighs 40kg and can dish out five dosas every 30 seconds. Explaining the mechanism of his invention, Mohan says, “First, you need to fill the container in the dosa-making machine with 30 litres of dosa batter and 10 litres of oil. Then, you need to swipe an ATM card and enter the number of dosas you require. Once the machine verifies the transaction, it gears into action and starts pouring the batter on the tawa, which is an attachable component of the dosa-making machine. Once the dosa is cooked, the machine would place it on a plate, serving it to the customer. There are also sambar and chutney containers. It will automatically pour sambhar and chutney into bowls,” says the student.
Mohan had incurred an expenditure of Rs 1.5 lakh for building the machine, out of which Rs 88,000 was sponsored by the research wing of his university.
— noorain.nasir@yahoo.com