Field Visit: Aurangabad, Akola: Jan 23 to Jan 25

Written Jan 29, 2017

On Monday night (Jan 23), I left for Aurangabad on the overnight train, the Devagiri Express. I traveled with two undergrad students, Vynatea and Saikrishna, in their final semester in the Energy department. They are going to be working on an energy audit of a spice factory—our destination in Aurangabad—while I work on developing a solar spice roaster. As usual, we took an auto (rickshaw) to the local train station, Kanjur Marg. We got some momos (dumplings) outside Kanjur Marg to eat on the train. We had to take the local train four stops to Thane, where we would catch the Devagiri Express to Aurangabad. The local train was relatively crowded, so we were standing up the whole time in close proximity to others. Generally the ride takes 15 minutes or so, but for some reason this night the train kept stopping in between stations for periods of time ranging between 2 and 15 minutes. In the US, there would be some sort of announcement on the train that says “we are experiencing technical problems” or “a train ahead has broken down,” but in India the train just stops with no explanation. We eventually heard through the grape vine that one of the tracks was not working, so all trains leaving the city were traveling on one track. After almost an hour on the local train, we reached Thane just 10 minutes before our scheduled boarding time. The Devagiri Express ended up coming about 30 minutes late because—you guessed it—all trains traveling out of the city (locals and long-distance) were traveling on the same track.

Finally we boarded the train at 10:15pm and ate our momos. The steamed momos with chicken were really good, but the fried ones were not as tasty. They came with a spicy red sauce that was precariously packaged. It was in a small plastic bag, of a material similar to a very flimsy trash bag, and tied at the top. I kept thinking it was going to spill after we untied it as the train bounced around, but somehow it did not. I guess it would not be packaged in such a way if it were going to spill.

We arrived in Aurangabad at 5:30 am and somehow found our pre-booked car in the parking lot. We had no idea where he was taking us, only his name and his phone number. The cab drove us about ten minutes to the guest house of a nearby university, Marathwada Institute of Technology (MIT), where Professor Sardeshpande has some good friends. Professor Sardeshpande arrived from Pune and we all slept for a few hours. The rest of the day consisted of a visit to a masala factory in Aurangabad. I was told it was “15 minutes away.” It took about 30 minutes to get there. We watched as women roasted various spices in large wok-style pans and men carried around bags of spices and operated larger machinery. The specialty of this factory is chatpat masala, a type of spice mixture with a base of onions, salt, and oil. Added to these onions are ginger, garlic, turmeric, chili, and a dry masala mixtures of 15-20 other roasted spices. We grabbed pinches of the completed chatpat out of the huge bin going for packaging—it was delicious and very spicy. I am planning to buy a big bag of it to bring back to the states on my last visit to Aurangabad. Unfortunately we were not able to take pictures inside the plant.

After our tour, we met Professor Sardeshpande’s friend Vinay Chawla, who teaches at MIT. He showed us around his projects, which include designing and building a home from a shipping container and vertical soil-less farming to grow feed for cattle. There were multiple generations of vertical farming that he has completed, one is more like a greenhouse that lets in some natural light and another is a small structure that uses mostly indoor lighting. He is planning to live in the shipping container home after it is complete; if he cannot live in it, how should he expect others to do so? Mr. Chawla is a very practical, hands-on person who, after working in the cell phone industry for 25 years, has decided to devote his energy now to developing products to help those who do not have much money. He also let me drive his tractor around the small yard in front of the shipping container. We had great conversation and I am looking forward to seeing him again during future field visits.

After a great dinner at the guest house, we chatted with Mr. Chawla for a while about how to best cool his shipping container house during the hot summer then packed up to travel. Vynatea and Saikrishna traveled back to Mumbai via train and I took a non-AC sleeper bus to Akola, my next destination. The ride was 6 hours long, leaving at 11:45pm and arriving at 5:45 the next morning. The sleeper bus has bunks: two singles on top of each other on the right side and two double beds on top of each other on the left. I was in a double top bunk, so I spent the night lying next to an Indian man who I have never seen before and likely will never see again. Surprisingly, I was able to get a decent amount of sleep during the bus ride. Compared to the train, the mattress was very soft and there was a semblance of a pillow at the head of the bed. The cons included that it was fairly bright all night because they never turned off the aisle lights (the light blue curtain did not quite cover the whole opening) and there were many more horns/bumps/sudden stops than on the train. When I arrived at Akola, I had a little confusion as to whether I was getting off at the correct of the two stops, but eventually got off at the right stop where a student from the agriculture university I was going to visit picked me up. We rode the five minutes back to the university guest house on his motorcycle! This was my first time on a motorcycle and it was really fun. I got cold very quickly from the morning air whipping by because I was wearing only a T-shirt and I was worried about not wearing a helmet, but the ride was fun nonetheless.

After collapsing for a couple hours on the guest house bed, I woke up and met Shilpa (who had come in on the overnight train from Mumbai) and two students from the university for breakfast. Our meeting that day was with Professor Bhoyar, the man who developed the vacuum cooking method for turmeric that was being used in the Kolhapur plant I visited a couple weeks ago. We talked most of the morning with him about the biological reasons for the different process parameters and toured his experimental setup where he tested his ideas. In the afternoon we went on a tour of some other departments at the university—in the display rooms showing past projects, most of the writing was in Maharati, so I looked at the pictures and asked some questions based on those. In the evening, Shilpa and I took an auto to the train station. Our next destination was Wardha, three hours away. We purchased Second Class tickets but went to sit in Sleeper class. Some nice ladies offered us some room on their benches and the ticket collector never came by to check our tickets, so we never had to pay the difference for sitting in the wrong section.

Stay tuned, another post about Wardha is coming soon.