Chiller-fridge works without external energy.

As a small boy over fifty years ago, I remember my father putting a tall aluminium pot containing a sweet milk product (baasundi) inside our home drinking water pot made of mud-clay (called madkaa). Ice was rare and often unhealthy. Fridges were only heard off and not seen.

We used to drink water from this ‘madkaa’ which had a small tap, since it used to be much cooler than ambient temperature and this was used to chill the food in the aluminium pot rather quickly.

Use of ‘madkaa’ for cool water is very popular all over India and food can be easily chilled in it. A small family can use larger ‘madkaa’ and chill veggies, fruits, cooked food and extend their shelf life.

Some 170 million households do not have a chiller or a fridge and all could immediately benifit from the ‘metal pot in a madkaa’ concept. Farmers need to use thick walled mud huts with double layered sloping roofs of wet staw mats as ‘chilled rooms’ to store the farm produce for market day. Water sprinkled on the outer walls will keep the inside temperature down.

The issue of promoting such ‘green concepts’ remains. This is traditional knowledge which is gradually being forgotten due to the loud multi channel shouts on the TV reaching some 75 million households in India. However, since simple basic desires are not being met even sixty years after political freedom and supply of electric energy for all the 220 million households in India is a dream for another ten years, NGOs and ‘activists’ need to promote the traditional knowledge to bring relief to the ignorant masses.