I grew up in a dusty corner of rural West Bengal where water was never just water. It was a daily uncertainty. Some days the hand pump spit out clear water; some days it came out cloudy, smelling of iron or mud. In the summers, it ran dry for hours, sometimes days. And during the monsoon, it overflowed with runoff that none of us trusted. I watched my mother boil water three times a day while listening to neighbors discuss who had fallen sick this week. Typhoid, dysentery, jaundice — words I learned very early. But as a child, you don’t call it scarcity. You call it life.

I didn’t understand then that the struggle wasn’t natural. It was avoidable. I thought every family had to boil water endlessly, buy tablets they couldn’t afford, or walk to the next village when the pumps failed. Only years later, when I left home for college, did I realize that clean water wasn’t a luxury — it was a right we never had.

In engineering school, I gravitated toward environmental systems and sustainable design. I wasn’t trying to build a startup. I wasn’t dreaming of innovations or prototypes. I was simply trying to understand why my childhood looked the way it did. When I learned how filtration worked, how contamination spread, how simple design could solve complex health problems, something inside me shifted. I realized the life I grew up with wasn’t fate; it was a failure of accessible technology.

The earliest version of Akhoi wasn’t even called Akhoi. It was a crude water pod made from recycled bottles and makeshift filters I assembled in my dorm corridor. I tested it with water samples my mother mailed me from home. Every time the sample turned clearer, every time bacteria counts dropped in university lab tests, I felt like I was undoing a part of my past — one experiment at a time.

But the real motivation arrived during my final semester. A flood swept through my hometown, and dirty water filled every courtyard. Families I knew were filtering muddy water through cloth because nothing else was available. Seeing those images pushed me from research to responsibility. I realized that waiting for someone else to solve this problem was no different from accepting that my childhood would repeat itself for the next generation.

Akhoi was born from that urgency — a commitment to build a device simple enough for any household, durable enough for rural environments, and clean enough to prevent the illnesses I’d watched for years. The design had to be elegant, but it also had to be unbreakable. Technology had to be advanced, but it had to feel familiar. Most importantly, it had to work without electricity, without technicians, and without dependence on infrastructure that often fails the people who need it most.

Every Akhoi pod we create carries a memory of where I come from — the hand pump, the steel buckets, the boiled water, the illnesses, the resilience. I built Akhoi so that no child grows up believing unsafe water is normal. It’s not. And through Akhoi, I intend to change that truth one village, one family, one pod at a time.