The IBC promised fair valuation and liquidation value as the pillars of a transparent process. I watched both fail at Su-Kam. A ₹300 crore fair-value company sold for a pittance — banks got ₹8 crore. This is what really happens.
After 30 years of building Su-Kam, I walked through liquidation myself. Here is what the IBC actually does to an entrepreneur — and why the Delhi High Court’s judgment in my case is a turning point.
Kunwer Sachdev Founder of Su-Kam · Inverter Man & Solar Man of India · Builder of India’s First Solar Digital
★ WIPO · United Nations Feature The Global Honor: What Being Interviewed by WIPO Taught Me About Indian Innovation &
How Su-Kam scaled from a single factory to 6 manufacturing plants across Gurgaon, Baddi and Katha. The Reliance-Temasek $10 million investment, the world-class corporate HQ, and the SMF battery factory — a dream project that taught one of the most expensive lessons in Indian manufacturing.
Between 2002 and 2005, Su-Kam launched three innovations that rewrote India’s power backup industry: the first DSP sine wave inverter (with Jagdeep Chauhan), the Solar Home Lighting System, and the ‘Home UPS’ — a new product category that the entire industry adopted within a year. Also: the first BEE 4-star inverter and how an airplane overhead panel inspired our LED indication system.
A customer’s daughter got shocked by a metal inverter. That incident led Kunwer Sachdev to create India’s first plastic-body inverter — the CHIC — which India Today called ‘Innovation of the Decade’. This is also the story of the Fairy Queen, an inverter shaped like a locomotive engine that tragically failed because of one small packaging mistake.
In 1998, a rude service technician told Kunwer Sachdev he wouldn’t understand inverter technology. That insult sparked two years of R&D, exploding MOSFETs, and the birth of India’s first MOSFET-based single-battery inverter. Featuring original photos of the first Su-Kam inverter, the Times of India ‘Digital Wonders’ article, and the R&D lab where it all happened.
Everyone knows Kunwer Sachdev as the Inverter Man of India. But Su-Kam started in 1988 with Cable TV systems — manufacturing CATV amplifiers, installing dish antennas for Doordarshan and the Indian Air Force, and distributing Echostar satellite receivers. This is the untold origin story, with original photographs from the archives.
The untold story of how Su-Kam Power Systems solved the biggest problem with transformer-based Online UPS systems — their massive power consumption. In 2015, we integrated an MPPT solar charge controller that bypasses the main charger, making the double-conversion Online UPS energy efficient without sacrificing the galvanic isolation Indian power conditions demand. Includes real R&D thermal test data and 84.28% efficiency results.