Vidyut Mohan is an award-winning environmental entrepreneur and co-founder of Takachar, a pioneering startup transforming agricultural waste into valuable products like biochar. Driven by his passion for climate change solutions, biomass technology, and sustainable agriculture, Vidyut has developed innovative portable machines that empower rural communities, reduce air pollution, and promote carbon sequestration. Recognized by the UNEP Young Champions of the Earth and Forbes 30 Under 30, Vidyut’s work addresses the critical issues of stubble burning and decentralized energy, creating scalable impact while advancing the circular economy and clean technology in India.
The Social Digest: You co-founded Takachar with a mission to turn agricultural waste into valuable products. What inspired this idea, and how did your journey into environmental entrepreneurship begin?
So I grew up in Delhi and i was used to the bad air quality and one of the reasons for it is the open burning of Biomass in farmlands around the city and having studied biomass technology in college,this is a problem I was quite passionate to solve and work towards so that is what drove me towards developing solutions for productive utilisation of biomass and I have always been passionate about using renewable energy and technology for creating livelihood opportunities for unprivileged rural communities right from my early college days and I interned at organisations that have been pioneers in this field during that time and that kind of inspired me to work in this area and that’s what I would like to see through our work at Takachar as well , where we develop small scale portable machines that are operated by entrepreneurs in rural areas to create income and livelihood opportunities using biomass. Another aspect of working in biomass is the multidimensional impact not only to prevent open burning of agricultural waste and hence air pollution through our work with biochar and carbon sequestration, one is also able to fight climate change , but also as I said create decentralized livelihood opportunities for these rural communities. But also when the farmers use this biochar in their farms , it increases crop yield so there is an agricultural angle to it as well. So all these multidimensional impacts of working with agricultural waste together with my own personal experience of solving air pollution led to this.
The Social Digest: What were the biggest technical or logistical challenges you faced in developing this solution, and how did you overcome them?
Okay, so the technical challenges were quite a lot, of course, I mean first of all we are developing a hardware product which takes a lot of time to develop ,right like a product like us takes about 10 years to do research and development and commercialize in the market unlike a typical software kind of a startup. So , obviously it was like a very hard thing to do. It was not only a mental effort in designing and testing these things but a lot of physical effort while testing this because ours is an outdoor machine operated in farms so one has to operate this thing by testing it out in cold , heat , rain, dust ,etc. So of course the hardships we have faced in designing has been a big part of our journey and also while we are the doing the R&D of the technology, one has to fundraise to develop all of this ,it was very challenging , also when you are not earning revenue and so that was the biggest challenge of this and of course now we are in the early stages of commercialisation and now we are essentially working with partners to scale us.
The Social Digest: you list early work like designing solar‑radiation estimators for TERI and biogas system design for SELCO Foundation—how did these experiences shape your understanding of decentralized energy solutions?
Well, I worked with pioneers in this field , I was a young student at that point and I got a chance to interact with a lot of pioneers in India ofc. And TERI was actually more of an academic and technical project but the work with SELCO involved more practical designing of a solution with a vision to find like light of the day , in terms of someone actually using it. Practically speaking, that was a very valuable experience for me on how to gather inputs and needs of the inducers in mind rather than coming with a technology that no one needs or wants and ofc I had the chance to interact with some of the very good leaders in this field during these internships that kind of helped shape my career and thought process.
The Social Digest: So you have worked for an year at the Berkeley lab and it was also covid that year (2020) so What did a typical day look like for you as a bioenergy consultant at Berkeley Lab because a lot of your work happens on field?
Before covid it involved a lot of market research and field research so a lot of travelling to the field and doing research and also doing the technical prototypes in our outdoor labs. Once Covid hit of course, it was not possible to go out due to the lockdown so it involved consolidating all that information into reports and typing that out and once the lockdown lifted I again had the chance to go back to our outdoor lab and do a lot of research of our equipment.
The Social Digest: How did working at institutions like Berkeley Lab and J-WAFS contrast with running a startup in India?
Well , those were different different projects and I was mostly in India during that time because the work involved doing research in India so all the technical work was happening in India , we made the machine here , we made the prototypes here, did all the market research here because all of it was very India focused so I would say not too different, very similar actually.
The Social Digest: From being named a UNEP Young Champion of the Earth to making Forbes 30 Under 30, your work has received global recognition. What do these honors mean to you personally and professionally?
Obviously, it is a great honour to receive these awards and my company and myself , we deeply value the support that provided and ultimately it is a validation of the problem that we are solving and the solution we are building so I guess it’s some sort of appreciation of that and it feels good to be validated in that form but of course ultimate validation for us would be how much scale we are able to archive and how many people end up using our solution and that’s what the ultimate validation would be for me personally speaking and that is what we are in the journey on at this point.
The Social Digest: Many startups struggle to bridge the gap between innovation and scalability. How have you approached scaling your impact while maintaining accessibility?
Well, I won’t claim to crack doing that but yes, we have essentially had our strategies to scale and of course as I said the initial period of developing the innovation upto a time and a point where it can be put out in field took a lot of time and that involved a lot of effort in fundraising and it was kind of the hustle at that point and I think we did decently well in that. And now of course we are scaling through partnerships and currently we are able to serve close to about 30,000 farmers a year through the biochar produced man equipment that is operated by our team as well as our partners.
The Social Digest: From your perspective, what is one prevalent misconception about climate technology or sustainability that you believe requires clarification?
The misconception is that, I mean i don’t know if it is a misconception as such but for climate tech to work, some of the basic principles of doing business and running a startup still works so you need to have a product market fit and you need to identify the inducers problems and needs and develop the solution accordingly. It’s very challenging to approach this completely from a technology perspective and seize scale because of that so I would always say stick to the basics as far as understanding who your market is, who your customer is and what their needs are and the work backwards towards your solution.
The Social Digest: What’s next for Takachar? Are there new products, regions, or collaborations on the horizon you can share with us?
Okay so right now we are completely focused on scaling our solution to process rice straw stubble in Northern India and convert that to biochar so you would want to see our equipment being deployed in every village in Northern India to convert biomass to biochar and also for solving the stubble burning issue. Also at the same time working with other partners in other parts of the country who want to use our solution and scale it in their geographies as well in other countries.
The Social Digest: If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring environmental entrepreneurs, what would it be?
My recommendation would be to focus on the problem that you are trying to solve and not your solution because solution will end up changing over time and tpo have a very good understanding of the problem and the needs of the inducer and identifying who your customers and inducers are and keep tracking that as you progress as you will develop the solution accordingly and it will keep you on the go on that basis. Because if you are too fascinated by your , you will be quite stuck up on that and that’s what leads to stagnation.
This interview was conducted by Angel Shukla from The Social Digest on 19/06/2025. If you have any interview recommendations or have a story that you want to share with our readers, get in touch with our editor Vedant Bhrambhatt, at editor@thesocialdigest.com
