IIT Bombay student’s ₹200 jugaad cooler that chills a room without electricity goes viral
Second-year engineering student Arjun Tiwari's clay pot and bicycle pump contraption has been viewed 28 million times on X after a professor posted a video of it.
A second-year mechanical engineering student at IIT Bombay has gone viral after demonstrating a room cooling device made entirely from materials costing less than ₹200 — a clay pot, a bicycle pump, copper tubing, and wet sand.
Arjun Tiwari, 19, from Varanasi, built the device as part of a low-cost engineering solutions assignment. His professor, Dr. Suresh Nair, posted a 90-second video of the device reducing the temperature of a small room by 6 degrees Celsius over 30 minutes without using any electricity.
The video accumulated 28 million views on X within 48 hours, with engineers, climate activists, and celebrities sharing it. Several NGOs working in rural electrification have already contacted IIT Bombay to explore scaling the design for use in communities without reliable power supply.
The principle is ancient — evaporative cooling has been used in the Middle East and South Asia for thousands of years — but Tiwari’s innovation is in the delivery mechanism, which uses the bicycle pump to create a slow, controlled airflow through the wet clay that maximises surface evaporation. “I just read about how old Persian wind towers worked and tried to replicate the physics with what I had,” he said.
