Two persons of Indian roots — Saket Soni and Kaushik Kappagantulu— feature in the inaugural list of 14 “Time Trailblazers: Designing and Making the Future,” across the world.
It recognizes an exclusive group of architects, engineers, founders, technologists, and builders whose work is expanding what is possible across housing, infrastructure, climate adaptation, mobility, and public health. Presented in partnership with Autodesk, Time will convene this year’s listmakers at a special event in Las Vegas on Sept. 14.
“This is a world full of potential, promise, and problems to solve. This is a world that is still being built. These 14 Trailblazers are standout examples of the many committed to building it,” Time editors wrote.
Indian American labor leader Saket Soni wants to protect the workers rebuilding communities after disaster, according to Time. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, hundreds of thousands of residents fled, many never to return. Soni did the opposite: He moved to Louisiana to support the cleanup crews.
In 2017, the New Delhi emigrant cofounded Resilience Force, a nonprofit that protects the rights of workers who make a living cleaning up after natural disasters.
As extreme weather events become more severe and more frequent, this itinerant cleanup crew, often comprised of undocumented workers and likely numbering in the hundreds of thousands, is a growing sector of the economy.
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Soni hopes to continue developing this much-needed workforce over the next decade. As well as providing legal advocacy for resilience workers, Resilience Force collaborates with third-party contractors to ensure laborers get better pay and safety standards.
Resilience Force model aims to directly confront three intersecting crises: climate change, the housing shortage, and a difficult job market. Inherently, Resilience Force also addresses a fourth crisis: anti-immigration sentiment.
“Everybody’s focused on how polarized the country is,” Soni says. “I see the opposite.”
Kaushik Kappagantulu is aiding India’s farmers with a “greenhouse in a box,” according to his Time profile. Hyderabad-based Kappagantulu’s grandmother taught him that if you work hard, you will succeed. But after graduating from engineering college and doing a volunteer program teaching homeless kids, Kappagantulu realized this was not the case for everyone.
“In rural India, most of the people work really hard, but because of a lack of access to different things, their hard work does not convert into success,” he told Time.
This revelation prompted Kappagantulu to dedicate himself to uplifting others. For six years he worked with school dropouts, helping them access jobs through vocational training.
Sensing a systemic problem that needed addressing, Kappagantulu pivoted to agriculture. In 2015, he launched an agri-tech enterprise called Kheyti, which means farming in Hindi.
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The goal was to help the more than 100 million smallholder farmers who produce the bulk of India’s staple foods like rice, wheat, and pulses. And one of the biggest challenges facing farmers today is the changing climate.
“Climate change is wiping out their hard work,” says Kappagantulu, adding that the average Indian farmer earns about $1,000 a year. “It is not even enough for them to make ends meet,” he says.
Kheyti’s solution was a low-cost modular “greenhouse-in-a-box.” These net houses are designed to be smaller than conventional greenhouses, suitable for the one-acre farmer. Each greenhouse is also paired with an AI-powered tool that offers farmers advice on things like choosing the best crops and managing pests.
The greenhouse-in-a-box concept won the Earthshot Prize in 2022. It’s been growing ever since, with Kheyti now working with roughly 7,000 farmers across eight Indian states. Kappagantulu aims to double this over the next 12 months with the support of the Indian government, which has recommended states partner with the company.
Kappagantulu hopes to take the greenhouses global in the next three years and has a pipeline of other products, including flexible solar panels that can be installed on top of the greenhouses.