BENGALURU: It usually takes a small seed of an idea to come up with something novel. Actor
Padmavati Rao’s new non-electrical frigde is an example of that. The creation was made with the aim to help farmers save their stocks. It all started when one of the compound walls around Rao’s house, which was made of hollow terracotta bricks, was demolished a few days ago. Initially, she planned to take the bricks to her village and reuse them. But with extra time on her hands with the lockdown, she decided to utilise it to come up with something new. Since issues faced by farmers is a topic that is close to her heart, a natural refrigerator sounded perfect to her.
The actor took inspiration from earthen pots and wet gunny sacks used to keep water cool. “I stacked the bricks on top of each other, without using cement, in the form of a square. For the rack, I also used a 20-year-old wire rack, which was a shoe rack until now. I got the walls up on three sides and then put a length of gunny sack cloth over the back wall.
A flattened cardboard carton doubled up as the door,” says Rao. It took her just a few hours to come up with it. She waters the gunny sack thrice a day to retain the fridge’s cooling effect, but with the overcast weather, she sometimes does it only once.
No invention is complete without an experiment. While contraption works well for vegetables and fruits, with tomatoes staying fresh for 15 days and oranges for 28 days, Rao says the actual test is to prevent milk from curdling.
“Milk managed to stay fresh for four days. Of course, I did my bit of bringing it out and boiling it every day. But I was then convinced that it was a fully functional fridge,” says Rao. Ask her if it can store cooked food, and she replies, “Food is supposed to be consumed fresh, and it’s unhealthy for our body, unsustainable for nature and food ecosystem to have it stale or processed or source it from afar. I hardly have any leftover food, but it might work for that too.”
Rao has moved from her double door fridge, which is converted into a cupboard now, to a small one but jokes that she might just permanently move to this new invention. She is aware of a similar fridge designed by potter Mansukhbhai Raghavbhai Prajapati in Rajasthan, one made using teracotta clay, and another that uses double walls of brick with sand between them for insulation. “We live inland where getting any kind of natural sand is illegal. Mine uses gunny sackcloth, which is easily available,” says Rao, who is planning to give the idea to people who can’t afford an electrical fridge.