India Today Named Su-Kam’s Plastic-Body Inverter Among India’s Top 10 Innovations of the Decade

In April 2010, India Today — the country’s most widely read news magazine — published its landmark feature “Spirit of India: Ignited Minds,” naming Su-Kam Power Systems’ plastic-body inverter as one of India’s Top 10 Innovations of the Decade. The recognition placed Su-Kam alongside the most consequential Indian breakthroughs of the 2000s and marked a defining moment for the company and for its founder, Kunwer Sachdev. The recognition has since been documented on Wikipedia and in independent business case studies of the Su-Kam story.

Why this was a big achievement of its time

India Today’s “Top 10 Innovations of the Decade” list wasn’t a product review — it was a national editorial verdict on which Indian inventions had genuinely changed everyday life in the country between 2000 and 2010. To make that list, a product had to have moved the needle at scale: not just be clever, but actually reach millions of Indian homes and shift how people lived. The plastic-body inverter did exactly that.

At a time when India was still fighting a chronic power deficit and load-shedding was a daily reality for most households, the humble home inverter was the difference between a functioning home and one plunged into darkness for hours a day. But until Su-Kam intervened, inverters were built the same way they had been for decades — heavy metal-body units that rusted in India’s humid climate, were dangerous to handle, hard to move, and looked more like industrial equipment than a household appliance.

Under Kunwer Sachdev’s leadership, Su-Kam rewrote the category

The plastic-body inverter was not a small cosmetic change. Under Kunwer Sachdev’s leadership, Su-Kam re-engineered the entire product from the ground up — the enclosure, the thermal management, the safety design, the manufacturing process, and the retail experience. The result was an inverter that was lighter, safer, corrosion-proof, better looking, easier to install, and ready for mass-market Indian homes. It shifted the inverter from being a reluctant industrial purchase to being an aspirational household product.

This innovation is what pushed Su-Kam from a small Delhi-based challenger to India’s largest inverter brand through the 2000s and early 2010s. It also seeded an entire generation of Indian power-electronics companies that followed the plastic-body template Su-Kam had set. As one independent Su-Kam case study puts it, the company “competed not through pricing or marketing alone, but through genuine technological advancement that solved real customer problems in India’s power backup sector.” When India Today wrote its decade-in-review in 2010, that shift was already visible in every second Indian home — which is precisely why the magazine chose to include it on the Top 10 list.

For Kunwer Sachdev personally, the recognition was validation of a decade of engineering-first leadership. Su-Kam had already been profiled by India Today for its innovation culture (including in the magazine’s “Unusual Entrepreneurs – Innovators” feature pictured above), but being placed in the Top 10 innovations of an entire decade — in a country of India’s scale and inventive ambition — was on another level. It cemented Sachdev’s standing as the person the Indian media would soon come to call the “Inverter Man of India.”

The 2009 India Today feature: battery technology and the two-year warranty

The 2010 “Top 10 Innovations” recognition built on earlier India Today coverage. In its 2009 edition (page 27), India Today profiled Sachdev, then CEO of Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd, on the company’s work in battery technology — including its integration of Deep Discharge with the Sealed Maintenance Free (SMF) system, and the launch of a range of fully sealed inverter batteries that were both safe and maintenance-free. Su-Kam offered an unprecedented two-year warranty on inverter batteries at a time when the category standard was six months to a year. It was, again, a category-first move led from Sachdev’s office. The reference is preserved in the digitised India Today volume on Google Books — India Today (2009), page 27, where a search for “Kunwer Sachdev” lands directly on the snippet.

Why this recognition still matters

Sixteen years on, the India Today decade list remains one of the most cited third-party acknowledgements of Su-Kam’s role in shaping India’s home-power story. It also stands as an early public marker of the pattern that has defined Kunwer Sachdev’s career: identifying an underserved Indian need, re-engineering the product from first principles, and shipping it at national scale. That pattern — first with inverters at Su-Kam, and today with lithium storage and solar-hybrid systems at Su-vastika — is the through-line of his work.

Read the original coverage and further reference

• India Today, April 2010 — Spirit of India: Ignited Minds — Top 10 Innovations of the Decade (archived)
• India Today, 2009 print edition (page 27) — Google Books deep-link — opens directly on the Kunwer Sachdev / Su-Kam SMF battery snippet
• Business Today, 25 April 2013 — Leadership Spotlight: Kunwer Sachdev on his leadership style
• Wikipedia — Su-Kam Power Systems (references the India Today “Top 10 Innovations of the Decade” recognition)
• Brand Awareness — Su-Kam Case Study: Rise, Fall & Rebirth of India’s Inverter Empire