Every hospital, food plant and water works in India fights the same quiet battle: kill the germs without leaving anything harmful behind. Chemical disinfectants do the first job and fail the second — they leave residues that have to be rinsed, vented or lived with. Now a technology developed at NIT Warangal promises both: it wipes out up to 99.9% of viruses, bacteria and other pathogens, the institute says, and then simply turns back into oxygen. Hyderabad’s MOHSoft Tech will take it to market, with the first industrial systems due to roll off the line early next year.
The technology harnesses the natural oxidising power of ozone — a form of oxygen that attacks microbes on contact and then decomposes into plain oxygen after use. Unlike conventional chemical disinfectants, it leaves no residue behind, which is what makes it so attractive for the places where cleanliness matters most: hospitals, food processing, water treatment and public infrastructure.
Born in a pandemic, built in a week
The story starts in May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Prof. D. Harnath of NIT Warangal’s physics department watched disinfection devices flood the market, most of them built around UV light, and set out to build something cheaper that used ozone gas instead. Working with PhD scholar P. Chandar Rao, he built the first prototype within a week.
The prototype, called OzoNIT, was as ingenious as it was humble: its body was a reassembled refrigerator bought from a waste collector, fitted with an ozone gas generator on top. At the click of a button it produced 500 milligrams of ozone, and the institute said a 20 to 25-minute exposure could kill up to 99.99% of viruses, fungi and bacteria — without a single sterilising chemical. Once the articles were sanitised, the ozone vented out automatically. The whole device ran on household electricity and consumed just 13 watts per use.
Inside the cabinet, labelled shelves held the stuff of everyday life: vegetables and fruits, packaged food, clothes, shoes, a wallet, a watch. It was a household answer to a pandemic problem — and, as it turned out, the seed of something much bigger.
From prototype to product line
On 5 November 2026, NIT Warangal signed a technology transfer agreement with MOHSoft Tech Private Limited to commercialise the ozone-based disinfection technology developed by researchers in its Department of Physics. The agreement gives MOHSoft the rights to manufacture, scale up and commercialise products based on the technology, for domestic and international markets.
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The inventors of the technology are Prof. D. Harnath and Prof. R. Rakesh of the institute’s physics department. NITW Director Prof. Bidyadhar Subudhi said translating research outcomes into technologies that address real-world challenges was an important part of the institute’s vision, and that the collaboration would take an indigenously developed technology beyond the laboratory and create opportunities for its wider adoption across sectors.
MOHSoft Tech’s Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Shyam Mamidi, himself an alumnus of NIT Warangal, said commercial production of the first batch of industrial ozone disinfection systems was expected to commence early next year, followed by pilot deployments. The systems are being developed for diverse applications, combining the institute’s research expertise with the company’s engineering and industry capabilities.
The people and the backing
MOHSoft Tech is a Hyderabad product-development company, based in Ameerpet, founded by Subha Chaganty (CEO) and Shyam Mamidi (Chief Strategy Officer), with Sri Chaganty as Founder and CTO. The company says it has delivered more than a dozen products to global markets. Its CEO, Subha Chaganty, said the company was pleased to partner with NIT Warangal, and that the two sides would develop efficient disinfection solutions for diverse applications.
Six years after a professor and his PhD scholar turned a discarded fridge into a steriliser, the same idea is becoming an industrial product line — designed in Warangal, built in Hyderabad, and aimed at the hospitals, food plants and water systems that want disinfection without the chemical aftermath. Ozone goes in, germs come out, and all that is left behind is oxygen.
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