In 2015, three people died inside a manhole in Kozhikode. An autorickshaw driver had stopped to help two municipal workers who had entered a drain to clear a blockage. None of them came out. Four engineering students from MES College of Engineering in Kerala could not move past it. Co-founder Rashid recalls: "Until then, we didn't even know what a manhole was. In our village, there was no manhole system. When we learned about this incident, we realised the scale of the issue and how deep the problem ran." Manual scavenging has been banned in India since 1993. It still claims a life every five days. Workers enter manholes breathing hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, and methane in near-zero visibility, almost always without gear. Nearly all are from marginalised communities, dying before fifty and leaving behind children who inherit the same work. The technology to change this simply did not exist. So Vimal Govind MK, Arun George, Nikhil NP, and Rashid K built it. After graduation, the four took corporate jobs, but the problem never left. In 2017, the Kerala government sought a robotic solution. They quit, returned to Kerala, and built Bandicoot: a 50-kg pneumatic spider-robot that descends into a manhole, expands its legs for stability, sweeps the floor with a 360-degree arm, and finishes in 45 minutes what three workers take two hours to do. Manual scavengers who once entered manholes now operate Bandicoot from above. PM Modi launched Bandicoot 2.0. The robots now operate across 22 Indian states and in four countries. The founders made Forbes Under 30 Asia. And the Indian government has officially replaced the term "manhole" with "machine hole." That last detail is small. But what it signals is not: a country slowly beginning to reckon with what it once asked human beings to do. @GenRobotic