My father told me I would never be able to do business.

He didn't mean it unkindly. He said it because I am honest, and honesty is a difficult way to sell anything here. People sugar-coat. People overpromise. He was right about the market, and he was right about me.

I studied engineering in Mysore and worked in Bangalore. I was doing courses in blockchain at Technopark when COVID came. My father died. My brother was still finishing his engineering.

The family battery shop was mine now, whether or not I was built for it. We had been Olapurakkal Agencies since 1997.

I was bad at selling. What I wanted was a business where the thing I sold was actually worth what I charged for it. So I started reading about solar.

The first customer

Around that time the biggest Luminous distributor in Calicut approached me with an arrangement. I bring him solar customers, he installs, I take ₹3,000 per kW.

My first customer came through a referral. I knew nothing — not how to pitch, not the technicals. The distributor sent one of his sales staff along with me. I asked him several times what I should say. He told me to just watch.

He promised the man everything.

He closed it that evening. The customer paid the advance. It was a 5 kW system, and I earned ₹15,000.

We gave the quote on 16 February 2024. Installation began on 6 March and the site work was finished on 8 March. The subsidy came through in April.

So the panels did go up in two days. What the man understood was that he would have solar in two days. From the day he signed to the day it was finally, completely done was about three months.

But the timeline was never the real damage.

That system has never produced properly. Not in the first month, not since. He told me so himself, through 2024 — many conversations, none of which the distributor ever had to know about. This March his app was showing around ten units a day from a 5 kW. The tops of the panels were filthy.

Nobody ever came for the cleaning. Not that year, not the next. Two years on, that distributor still hasn't replied to him.

On 27 June 2026 we went to that house and cleaned the panels ourselves. It wasn't our system and it wasn't our responsibility. We didn't tell him why we came.

That was the first customer I ever sold to, and the last one I cheated.

For more than two years that roof has been losing him money on every clear day, and he had no way of knowing. Nobody was looking at it. That is the ordinary way solar fails here — not dramatically. Quietly, for twenty years.

Vivek

When my brother finished his engineering he took over the battery shop, and I went fully into solar with Vivek.

We were in school together. He is my closest friend, and I mean that as a fact about my life, not a line on a website.

I asked him because of who he is. He is honest. He is kind. He works harder than anyone I have worked alongside, and he takes responsibility for things nobody would have blamed him for. He already held the two rules I held, before we ever sat down and discussed them: never cheat a customer, and always do the best work, even when it means less profit.

He is not staff and he is not a partner on paper only. Everything you can see on our sites, he has stood on a roof and done.

Learning it properly

Neither of us knew anything at the start. We bought courses on Udemy. We read everything we could find — MNRE rules, KSEB rules, how the bank side actually works. We went to Delhi for the largest solar exhibition in the country. We sat through manufacturer classes. We still do.

There was nobody here to ask, and I have come to think that was the luckiest thing that happened to us.

If someone in Wayanad had been willing to teach us, we would have learned everything they knew — including everything they had wrong. Instead we had no choice but to go to the manuals, the standards and the manufacturers themselves. We learned it the way it is actually written down, not the way it has been passed around this district for twenty years.

The first roof was mine

We had to start somewhere, and I wasn't willing to learn on a customer's house.

So we built the first system on my own.

Commissioned

01.03.2025

System

3 kW

Generated · 17 months

6,410 units

Value

₹54,449

Average

4.1 units / kW / day

At that rate it will have paid for itself in a little over four years. It is also the number we quote every customer, which is the point — we say four units per kW per day because that is what our own roof does, not because it sounds good.

We found faults on that first system. We fixed them on the second. Then we replaced our electrician with a more expensive one who could see what we were trying to build. If we had learned all that on a customer's roof, they would have carried our mistakes for twenty years.

What we go looking for

If a part isn't available in Wayanad, we go to another district. If it isn't in Kerala, we bring it from Chennai or Bangalore. If it isn't in South India, it comes from Delhi.

Usually for something small. Something nobody will ever see once the work is finished.

Where this leaves us

Our rates are higher than most. Our profit on each system is lower than most. Those two things are true at the same time, and they are the same decision.

Most of the people selling solar here are not installers at all — they are commission agents, exactly as I was. Two profits come out of one price before any material is bought. That is why a cheaper quote is usually a thinner roof, and why ours costs more while we make less on it.

I haven't yet seen a site in this district built better than ours. I go and look at other people's work — the structure, the earthing, the wiring, the protections. I know what our customers are getting.

Most of them don't. It may not be visible for five years or more, and by then they will have forgotten which company chose the fasteners.

I've made peace with that. Work done properly gets recognised eventually, even when nobody is watching it happen.

A plant that pays you back for twenty years, and keeps going after. That's the whole ambition.