[100 Emerging Women Leaders] How Akanksha Priyadarshini is mitigating pollution through an IoT-enabled intelligent system

Born into a defence family, Akanksha Priyadarshini’s childhood was spent living across the country. She remembers basking in tree-lined roads of Ludhiana, Pune and Siliguri before coming back to live in Bhubaneshwar, her homeground.

Even as Priyadarshini loved the greenery surrounding her home and school, she realised that it did little to mitigate the pollution in the air. 

She grew increasingly aware of this difference when she enrolled in a BTech degree course at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela, a town primarily known for two things—its premier engineering institute and steel plant. Priyaradshini recalls the pollution in the air being so palpable that her mother developed asthma and many of her friends in college developed respiratory problems. 

What started then as a young girl’s quest to find practical solutions to this problem as an engineering student, led her to start Aurassure, an IoT-enabled intelligent system that monitors environmental gasses, dust and weather parameters to offer end-to-end solutions, in 2022. 

Today, the organisation is actively working to bridge the information gap between citizens and the government with the help of wireless and sensor-based technologies.

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How it all began

While at NIT, one of Priyadarshini’s seniors founded his startup, Phoenix Robotics, where she began interning and eventually working full-time after college. 

While The Rourkela Steel Plant was the major industry in the region, Priiyadarshini found that there were many smaller industries that faced major challenges in mitigating environmental damage in the region. That’s when she learned that while the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) mandated them to purify the emissions before releasing them into the air, the only solutions available to them were highly expensive US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) certified devices.

“We learned that the entire setup would cost Rs 2.5-5 crore, and this was unimaginable for small-scale industries,” says Priyadarshini. “We asked ourselves—can we develop similar solutions but at a cost-effective rate.” 

She soon became a core member of Phoenix Robotics where she wore multiple hats—from hardware designing, to supply chain management, operations, installation, and even customer interactions. After COVID-19, when the company started focusing its resources on healthcare and remote operations, Priyadarshini developed a blueprint for a new air quality and flood management product titled Aurassure. 

In 2022, she exited the startup and started her own company by the same name.

”We started with the idea of building a data analysis platform, where we can use the data we collected from our hardware devices to help answer the ‘what if’ questions in disaster management,” says Priyadarshini. “We focused our solutions not just on the government but also climate-sensitive industries, including construction, real estate and insurance, and environmental organisations,” she adds.

While monitoring and measurement was just one end of the solution, developing action plans were the other. That is when Google touched base with Aurassure - something Priyadarshini believes has been a game-changer for the company—to go beyond just measuring pollutants and showcasing data, and involve stakeholders like government bodies, research institutions, and activists in climate action.

Along with Google Maps and an analytics company they acquired, Aurassuure developed a hyper-local air quality monitoring system that utilises satellite-based information and an analytic solution to forecast the weather with up to 95% accuracy. 

“With Google, we started collecting extensive on-ground data. We then worked on processing and forecasting it on a real-time basis to provide information on hotspots, highly polluted areas and the source behind the pollution,” says Priyadarshini.

They then ran climate models and risk mapping of the data they collected to understand factors like the livability index in a city, health impacts for insurance and possible risk factors. And finally, with the help of their team of climate scientists, they drew out solutions, including early warnings that can help build resilience and solve the problem without any economic losses.

“For our pilot, we got support from the public transport authority in Bhubaneshwar. The Odisha State Pollution Control Board also got involved to help us,” says Priyadarshini. “We then expanded the project to Chennai, Rajkot, Aurangabad, and Navi Mumbai.”

Aurassure has also collaborated with IIT Delhi, IIT Mumbai, and Columbia University for research.

Among the construction giants Aurassure has worked with are Tata Realty and L&T Realty. While these are big names willing to invest in their solution, Priyadarshini says a majority of organisations still lack the awareness to recognise the intensity of the problem and how it is economically hampering them in the long term. 

“But I see change happening because the government is already aiming for us to go net-zero by 2070, so compliance is going to become critical,” says Priyadarshini. 

Aurassure generated a revenue of Rs 1 crore when they started and hit Rs 5.4 crore in their second year. With deployments in over 150 cities in India and plans to expand operations to Brazil and some parts of Southeast Asia, they have a target of Rs 15 crore this year, says Priyadarshini. 

Women in climate tech

Priyadarshini says it is common to see men dominating leadership positions in organisations and ministries working on climate change. But women, she says, have the power to approach the issue with sensitivity.

“When it comes to these kinds of technologies, you may be pitching with cost-cutting or revenue generation in mind, but as a principle, we are looking at social and environmental impact,” she says. “I see a lot of potential in women across the sector functioning with great foresight for correcting the course in climate change for the future generations.”