D. Chandrasekhar, also known as Capt. Sekhar, was a merchant navy captain in a seagoing career of two decades. He is currently the MD of www.alphamers.com and www.betatankrobotics.com.
He has studied finance management at Singapore and Executive Management at IIM Bengaluru. Driven by a simple personal desire to clean water bodies, he saw the arrest of solid waste and plastics in rivers as the low-hanging fruit. He designed a floating steel barrier in 2015, to arrest solid waste using only the flow of the rivers and no fossil fuel.
Capt. Sekhar has also developed 15 other technologies, patented 6 and commercialized 4 of them. These include (i) ocean wave energy harvesters, (ii) robotics for unmanned cleanup of petroleum tank sludge, (iii) managing siltation in drains and streams, and (iv) floating perimeter security systems on the water. He believes that innovation should solve real-world problems.
He also believes that innovation is done more inside the mind than on the shopfloor. He plans to start open-sea plastics cleaning soon, using ocean renewable energy.