KACHARAGADLA

One of my fondest memories of growing up in a small town in India is making gashes in the bark of a tree on the way to school. The next day we would collect the gum which had seeped out. It was fun to use the natural gum to stick labels on our notebooks, even if it was messy. Later I graduated to industrially produced adhesives, from simple glue to quick fixes for broken objects. But it’s only recently that I learned about the sophisticated technology and precision manufacturing involved in adhesives for such critical products as the wings of aircraft. One of the leading manufacturers of adhesives of this kind is Henkel, headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany. Its Dragon Plant (the name is a cultural homage to the plant’s sheer magnitude) in Shanghai, China, is the  world’s largest adhesives factory , and aims to be the smartest one, too. I was intrigued to discover how an IoT (internet of things) product made by an Indian startup, Flutura, in Bangalore is playing a transform