Last year, on his trip to a village (name withheld for privacy) in Tamil Nadu, Navjot Sawhney presented Divya with a washing machine, an updated version of the prototype he’d created and named after her in 2017. It was a full-circle moment for Navjot; after all, Divya, a resident of that village, was the inspiration behind the aeronautical engineer’s idea to start The Washing Machine Project, an idea that, in retrospect, he recalls as the inflection point of his life. 

Even after all these years, Navjot clearly recalls Divya’s complaints of persistent backache and skin irritation caused by the traditional practice of washing clothes by hand. 

The British-born Navjot, who was on a sabbatical at the time and travelling through India, channelled his ingenuity into building a low-cost manual washing machine, which reworks the process, requires no electricity, and uses very little water. 

As he explains, “I was working at a high-end vacuum manufacturing company when I took a sabbatical. After experiencing the village lifestyle and its problems, it did not feel right to use my skills to make products benefiting the privileged. So, I quit my job and spent nearly a year coming up with a washing machine.” 

To date, Navjot and his team have taken the machine to communities across 14 countries, including India, Iraq, Lebanon, Mexico, Kenya, Uganda, the Republic of Congo, South Africa, Ghana, and Greece, as well as refugee centres in Gaza, Palestine, and Uganda.

The unseen labour behind a daily........

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