“I innovate, therefore I am.” The mantra of a man who bet on solar a decade before the rest of India.
In a striking full-page feature, India Today crowned Kunwer Sachdev, chairman of Su-Kam Power Systems, “The Solar Man of India.” The profile paints him as a man possessed of tremendous vision, driven by a signature ode to what he calls “technovation” — and, by 2017, focused almost entirely on making green, solar energy available to every household in the country.
A bet placed a decade early
What impressed the magazine most was Sachdev’s timing. He had predicted an imminent boom in solar-energy equipment a full decade before it arrived, and that foresight shaped everything Su-Kam built. While competitors were still treating solar as a niche, he was reorganising an entire company around it — a conviction that, India Today notes, led Su-Kam to acquire the largest market share in India’s solar residential sector. Behind the numbers was a single, deliberately audacious aim he stated without hedging: to power every Indian household with solar energy.
Innovation as identity
The feature reads, in places, like a product showcase — because for Sachdev, the products were the argument. India Today highlights Solatron, a one-of-its-kind solar conversion kit that let ordinary users transform an existing inverter into a solar inverter, sparing them the cost of starting from scratch. It spotlights Brainy, described as the world’s first hybrid solar home UPS. And it points to his work on a unique solar DC system — equipment engineered to run directly on DC power, cutting the conversion losses that plague conventional setups and delivering, in his telling, dramatically higher efficiency for everything from a small rural home to a large manufacturing facility.
“I innovate, therefore I am.”— Kunwer Sachdev, in India Today
The Internet of Things, before it was fashionable
Perhaps the most forward-looking part of the profile is where it turns to what Sachdev’s team was building next. In 2017 — long before smart devices were commonplace in Indian homes — he was already developing an IoT (Internet of Things) product. To illustrate, he described a solar street light with a built-in camera installed at the gate of his own office, controllable entirely from his mobile phone, with plans to add microphones so a visitor at the gate could be heard from inside the premises. Su-Kam, he told the magazine, would launch advanced solar street lights commercially in July 2018.
Powering every Indian household
Running through the whole piece is a sense of mission rather than mere commerce. Sachdev frames solar not as a premium add-on but as the practical answer to a country that still struggles with reliable power — a way to take clean, dependable electricity into homes that the grid has never fully served. It is that framing, as much as any single invention, that the magazine credits for the loyalty Su-Kam commanded among Indian consumers.
Vision, tempered by humility
For all the ambition on display, India Today is careful about the character behind it. Sachdev’s success, it concludes, is the outcome of decades of passion and energy — tempered by an enduring humility. He comes across less as a tycoon than as a restless engineer who happens to run a company: someone who measures himself by what he builds next, not by what he has already achieved. It is that combination of relentless invention and personal modesty that earned him the title the feature gave him — the Solar Man of India.