I have something positive to report.

The students of @sen_jonaki and I use electroporators for gene delivery in chick and mouse embryos. Between the two laboratories we have three electroporators out of which two were not working causing enormous difficulty for the students.

All the three machines that we have are imported, costing few lakh rupees each. Also, since number of users in India is very small thus almost no service is provided. I was not even provided warranty service for one of machines.

What these machines do - They provide precise electric pulse for a very short & precise duration e.g. 12 V for 5 microseconds. Without this devise we won't be able to do any of the molecular genetics experiments in chick and some of the experiments in mice.

Due to the prevailing situation, the vendor could not arrange any service for the machines. Students were losing precious time. Desperate, we reached out to one of our colleagues in the electrical engineering department - Prof. Santanu Misra ( https://home.iitk.ac.in/~santanum/ ).

Santanu is an expert of power electronics. Him and his students fabricated some circuits which in conjunction with the non-functional electroporators are working fine and our students are happily running their experiments.

He is happy to make electroporators from the scratch for other scientists for a very reasonable cost - less than 10% of the price we pay for the imported brands.

I am so happy to be at @IITKanpur, a centre of excellence in so many disciplines

@PrinSciAdvGoI @IndiaDST @DBTIndia