One Year of Building

The Insight

In January 2025, I was standing inside a steel plant in Hofors, Sweden. A small town of four thousand people, deep in the forests of Gävleborg. The plant belonged to Ovako, the first steelmaker in the world to heat billets using green hydrogen. I was there as a researcher from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, working on a project that brought together Hitachi Energy, Volvo Trucks, and a question nobody had a clean answer to: how do you make hydrogen production self-sustaining?

The answer came from the numbers. The heat thrown off during hydrogen production was almost exactly what you needed to purify the water going back into the system. Ninety-nine percent coverage. The math was so elegant it felt like it had been waiting for someone to notice.

That was the moment everything changed.

Coming Home

A month later, I was back in India. Eight years of research in Sweden, and the relationships I'd built across the continent didn't break. They stretched. The partnerships in water treatment and hydrogen technology stayed alive, now spanning Stockholm, Hofors, and Jaipur.

March became design month. I wrote the Pratham whitepaper, sketched a ninety-day prototype plan, priced out every component, and studied nine manufacturers across three different production methods. In April, I walked into the Green Hydrogen India Symposium at The Oberoi in New Delhi. A hundred people, invite-only. ReNew, NTPC, and Hygenco were all in the room. So was I.

On April 12, 2025, Ekavikalp Private Limited was incorporated.

First Bricks

I built the first version of HyGOAT, our certification platform, in four days. That same month, India launched its Green Hydrogen Certification Scheme. The regulatory wave we had been preparing for arrived right on time.

Then came everything else. A bank account. A GST registration. A trademark filing. The quiet, unglamorous infrastructure that turns an idea into a real company, assembled one piece at a time.

Finding Our Voice

By autumn, we started writing. We published analysis on India's green ammonia auctions. We distilled twelve takeaways from the country's first Green Hydrogen R&D Conference. Every industry webinar became a classroom. Every conference call sharpened the way we thought about the market.

In November, I attended ICGH 2025 at Bharat Mandapam, sitting alongside global certification bodies like CertifHy, SGS, TUV Rheinland, and Bureau Veritas. That same month, I stood in front of faculty at NIT Raipur and gave two sessions on hydrogen digitization and safety for the AICTE-ATAL Development Programme. A year earlier, I had been a student. Now I was the one at the lectern.

The Call from Tokyo

In January 2026, I got a message from AlphaSights Tokyo. They wanted a paid consultation on the membrane distillation market. Someone on the other side of the world had found my work on LinkedIn and decided it was worth paying for.

Meanwhile, HyGOAT had grown into something serious. It could now screen hydrogen projects against certification standards from India, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Five countries. One platform. What started as a four-day prototype was becoming a real product.

National Television

On February 28, 2026, National Science Day, I appeared on Doordarshan. DD Jhalana. India's public broadcaster, the channel my parents grew up watching.

“विज्ञान एक जीवन शैली है”Science is a lifestyle.

We talked about green hydrogen, about building things from scratch, about India's road to a $30 trillion economy by 2047. When national television gives airtime to green hydrogen, you know the conversation has shifted. It is no longer niche. It is becoming the mainstream.

Where We Stand

In March 2026, the iStart Rajasthan Ideation Grant came through. Our GST Letter of Undertaking cleared, making Ekavikalp export-ready.

Fourteen months. Two products. Research partnerships that survived a move across continents. A national television appearance. A government grant. And a team of two that refuses to slow down.

None of it happened because we announced it would. It happened because we built it.