Sometimes, the path to innovation doesn’t start in a garage or a laboratory—it starts in a hospital ward.
For Dr. Srikanth Sola, the Founder and CEO of Devic Earth, the journey began in 2008. After a successful career as a cardiologist at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic in the U.S., he made a life-changing decision to return to India. This wasn’t a career move. It was a calling to serve the poor at a charitable hospital in Bengaluru.
But within days of his return, Dr. Sola noticed something deeply troubling that would shift his focus from treating hearts to healing the sky.
The Wake-Up Call
“In my first week, I was astounded by the number of patients I saw with heart disease due to air pollution,” Dr. Sola recalls.
What shocked him wasn’t just the volume of patients. It was their age. Young people in their 20s and 30s were walking in with severe heart ailments. The culprit wasn’t just lifestyle or genetics—it was the air they were breathing.
Dr. Sola realized that modern medicine had limits if the environment itself was toxic.
“I can keep doing angioplasties the whole day, but this is just a drop in the bucket,” he says. “So, I decided to build something that will make air quality better across large spaces”.
From MRI to the Sky
Dr. Sola didn’t just rely on his medical training; he tapped into his background in biomedical engineering. He drew inspiration from MRI technology, which uses pulsed radio waves to create images of the body. Then he asked a pivotal question: ‘What if similar waves could be used to clean the air?”
He looked at how nature already handles pollution.
“Dust particles have positive and negative charges, just like magnets,” Dr. Sola explains. “Attracted by those magnetic forces, they collide and become larger in size. Because they’re heavier, they fall to the ground.”
He built “Pure Skies” to simply accelerate this natural process. By using pulsed radio waves, the technology helps pollutants clear much faster, effectively doing for the air what the body’s own filtration systems do on a smaller scale.
A Million Lives
Today, the mission is bigger than just technology. It is about saving lives.
“Devic Earth aims to save at least a million lives every year from the menace of air pollution,” Dr. Sola states.
Whether it is for a factory, a school, or a city, the goal remains the same: ensuring that clean air isn’t a luxury.
As Dr. Sola puts it, “Whether in a factory, an office, or even a Swamiji’s satsang in the Himalayas, wherever people breathe, there is a need for clean air”.
Reflecting on his transformation from a doctor to a climate-tech entrepreneur, Dr. Sola shares a simple philosophy for changemakers:
“If you want to reinvent the world, you have to start by reinventing yourself”
Photo taken with patient’s written permission.
