State-owned Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) went for a “radiation correction” at its Mumbai refinery six years ago. And that meant placing certain “chips” in the plant at “right” locations to correct the bad effects of Earth’s magnetic field.

“This might sound like superstition. But it isn’t,” says a former BPCL official, emphasising that these “high-frequency” chips that a Delhi-based company, Syenergy Environics , installed at the refinery helped improve productivity of both man and machine.

He says a similar exercise, of purging the workplace of the ill-effects of Earth’s magnetic radiation , is now being planned at the Bina, Madhya Pradesh, refinery of Bharat Oman Refineries, a joint venture between BPCL and Oman Oil Company.

“The idea is simple. It is to create general well-being and to enhance productivity,” says the official asking not to be named because he is not authorised to speak to the media. He adds, “But of course all this is no substitute for technological innovation and upgradation. If your technology is bad, radiation correction using these chips won’t help. They can only complement your technological prowess.”

Chipping in Bloom?

Well-said, of course, feels Mumbai-based Rohit Poddar, managing director at the Poddar Group, who handles its real estate, sustainable textiles, organic farming and ITeS businesses. “

The energy levels at our construction sites, my home, my parents’ home, our senior managers’ homes, offices, etc did go up [after installing chips from Syenergy],” he says. He has spent money for a “purpose”, but this Cambridge University alumnus hastens to add that “it is tough to ascertain how these chips impact your profit and loss”.

Unlike the former BPCL official who says the health of both machines and people have improved thanks to these chips, Rohit Poddar says “he can’t pinpoint the advantages of these [chips]”. Yet both of them, one a near-blind believer and the other a sceptic, represent the growing tribe of corporates that are ready to invest in the so-called radiation correction to boost productivity at work.

Another PSU official vouches for fewer machine “breakdowns” and the former BPCL official says the pulse rates of his former colleagues had lowered considerably post “radiation correction”.

Man and Machine

“The data [thanks to feedback] that we have collected from our clients over the past seven years shows that improvements are drastic [following radiation correction],” says 30-year-old Pranav Poddar, director, Syenergy Environics, a graduate in industrial engineering from Purdue University.

“We didn’t get orders from companies such as Indian Oil Corp in one shot,” he says. “They gave it to us over five years based on results the chips produced at their refineries. Post-radiation correction, there were fewer machine-related problems and higher productivity of workers,” he adds.

Before he goes on to explain what exactly his company does to ward off negative radiation caused by Earth’s magnetic field, he dwells at length on his clients. “We have already done radiation correction [by installing the company’s trademark Enviro chips] for 1,000 establishments,” he says. Syenergy Environics started off seven years ago servicing individual clients. Some 200 of them later, it started getting corporate customers. “And that became a trend,” says Pranav.

“We have no competition whatsoever in India, and even abroad, there are hardly any commercial players. As a science it is still confined to academic circles,” says Pranav, adding that his company’s clientele isn’t restricted to any one segment or group.

“We have clients from PSUs such as HPCL, BPCL, SAIL besides IOC, and private companies like PepsiCo, GMR, Taj Group of Hotels and numerous others.” Some of his celebrity customers include actors Jackie Shroff and Arshad Warsi and fashion designer JJ Valaya. “We review a location six months after we install chips,” adds Pranav.

The ‘Science’ of It

What Pranav’s firm does is simple: it places chips on the Earth’s magnetic gridlines to “harmonise radiation from these gridlines”. How are gridlines located? “Gridlines that pass on an average every 7-8 metres north to south and east to west are located by physically scanning for them using a Lecher antenna [named after Austrian scientist Ernst Lecher who designed it],” says Pranav.

How do you use this antenna? “You have to be trained, typically for a few days, in using this equipment. And you have to walk the entire office to scan for these gridlines by holding it in a particular way with your hands...The moment it detects a gridline, it deflects towards you. At the ends of these gridlines in an office or in a refinery we install chips to neutralise radiation due to these gridlines.”

How Earth’s Radiation ‘Affects’ You



Earth behaves like a giant spherical magnet. However, unlike a bar magnet, its field changes depending on the change in the motion of molten iron alloys in the planet’s outer core.



Earth’s magnetic nature explains why compasses work and how people have used them, for centuries, to travel both through land and sea.



Its magnetic field also produces radiation. However, the study of this radiation, also called geopathic stress, is hotly contested and attracts many sceptics.

So what happens when these “energy chips” are placed? “The instrument deflects away from you. It shows that the stress caused by the radiation is gone,” says Pranav. “We have a checklist of 20 things that we check for using the tool. Two of them are magnetic gridlines and underground water streams,” he notes.

“The study of all this is called geopathology and we are in touch with the best researchers in the field,” he adds. “These chips have frequencies much higher than those of the gridlines. And they neutralise their effect,” explains Pranav. Machines placed along gridlines and people seated on them are normally under enormous stress, but “this correction” makes them stress-free, he explains.

While most companies that ET on Sunday spoke to, including a few Navaratna ones, said they were “happy” with the “positive” changes, many of them also said they can’t attribute “improvements” “entirely” to these energy chips . “We have no full proof. We still think the changes are phenomenal,” a senior official of a conglomerate said, requesting not to be identified.

Serendipity, Then a Hobby

It all started in the 1980s when Pranav’s father, Ajay Poddar, Syenergy’s managing director, faced “numerous unexplained difficulties” at an LPG cylinder manufacturing plant he used to run in Uttar Pradesh. “He was not keen to correct Vaastu-related ‘problems’. It was then that he met a few academics based in Pondicherry who studied geopathology.”

Pranav says Ajay Poddar “implemented things” with the help of these scientists. “Labour issues and other problems soon vanished. From being a sick company, his factory started making profits,” he adds. “Until very late, as late as 2004, my father didn’t think it could be a business opportunity, too. For him, radiation correction using chips was just a hobby, and he mostly helped his friends,” Pranav says.

So How Do Enviro Chips ‘Help’?

A Delhi-based firm, Syenergy Environics, has developed a product called Enviro Chip, which the company claims alters the nature of radiation from negative to positive, thereby ‘getting rid’ of adverse effects of Earth’s magnetic field. Enviro Chips operate at frequencies between 500 and 600 THz, above frequencies of gridlines of the geomagnetic field. They generate waves to ‘harmonise’ Earth’s radiations. The company has also made chips to ‘neutralise’ microwaves emitted from mobile phones, computers and other similar devices.



...And How is the ‘Help’ Provided?

Some Indian corporates have spent money on Enviro Chips to ‘boost productivity of their machines and personnel in offices’; chips have been fixed on PCs and mobile phones.



Inside Office: These chips are placed at ‘gridlines of the geomagnetic field to produce best results’; the gridlines are located using Lecher antennas, named after an Austrian physicist who designed the equipment



On Laptops, Mobile Phones : The chips aimed at ‘neutralising’ radiation from cell phones and computers are placed on the equipment; available between Rs 275 and Rs 850, the Enviro Chip varies in size as it is designed for different devices such as mobile phones, laptops and desktop computers. Syenergy doesn’t sell them through outlets, but they can be ordered online.

Opportunity Strikes

“We make our own chips to neutralise the negative effects of Earth’s radiation,” says Pranav adding that business momentum is slowly picking up as more people are getting to “know about it”. Syenergy Environics charges its clients `2-13 per sq ft for “radiation correction”. The company is slowly diversifying into other “radiation-correction” segments as well. It also makes chips to ward off “radiation” from mobile phones and computers.

Pranav claims his company’s “experiments” in tie-ups with medical institutes in Delhi demonstrated a marked fall in the pulse rates of BPO employees put under observation after using such chips. Currently, they are not available through retail outlets, but can be ordered online.

Pranav runs the Lecher antenna over a cell phone to show its deflection towards him, and then he sticks a chip on it to show the equipment deflecting away. “More and more studies are coming out on the adverse effects of mobile phones. So is the case with laptops and PCs,” he says. Pranav says companies such as State Bank of India and PepsiCo have also bought such chips for their employees.

Pranav’s company has further developed “chips and strips” to change the “nature of radiations from mobile phone towers to make them less harmful for the human body”. However, for a science that he says has roots in Germany, where in the last century GPs diagnosed people living in the same room for a prolonged period with similar diseases, critics abound.

D Ranganathan, principal scientific officer, physics department, IIT Delhi, gets really caustic. “It is a fraud,” he laughs. “It is not,” says the ex-BPCL official. It’s the familiar argument between believers and scientists. But believers are buying.