When NCLT ordered liquidation of Su-Kam Power Systems, 2000 people lost jobs in one day. The founder tells what really happens when the system shuts down a company — the families, the theft, the destruction. Part 2 of The IBC Files series.
Opinion • Manufacturing IBC Reform Make in India Banking Entrepreneurship The Broken System: How IBC, Banks & Bureaucracy Are Destroying
My Story · The Su-Kam Years · Solar The Solar Projects — the installations that made us proud We started
My Story · The Su-Kam years The day we kept Wal-Mart’s stores running The Bharti–Walmart Easyday backup — a 25KVA
IBC Amendments: Who Do They Really Serve? Every Change Strengthens the Creditor — The Entrepreneur Gets Nothing The IBC Files
Su-Kam built India’s first Facebook solar community in 2009 — 143,000 members strong — years before digital marketing became a standard. Kunwer Sachdev on why he bet on social media when the entire industry was still running newspaper ads.
When the United Nations’ WIPO selected Kunwer Sachdev for a feature interview on Indian innovation and IP, it was recognition of Su-Kam’s patent legacy on a global stage. A personal account of what being featured by WIPO taught him about protecting 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.