How a solar-electric boatbuilder from Kerala ended up in business school classrooms.
I’m proud to share that Navalt is now the subject of a management case study published through Harvard Business Publishing. Titled “NAVALT: Scaling Solar-Electric Boatbuilding Through Supply Chain Strategy,” it was written by Prof. Shiril Saju and Prof. Nishant Kumar Verma of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and released in May 2026. It will now be taught in classrooms around the world.
For a company that started with one stubborn question — why does a boat have to burn diesel? — this is a good place to have arrived.
What the case is about
It would have been easy to focus on the obvious headline: an Indian company building solar-electric boats, putting Aditya on Kerala’s backwaters. But the professors chose the harder question — the one that keeps founders awake at night.
How do you scale?
Building one clean, quiet, solar-electric ferry is an engineering achievement. Building dozens of them and shipping them to customers across states and countries is an entirely different problem. Not a problem of vision — a problem of architecture: the suppliers, the make-versus-buy decisions, the integration choices that decide whether you grow or break.
That’s what the case examines — how Navalt restructured its supply chain to move from proving a technology to scaling an industry. Because clean-tech ventures rarely fail on the science. They fail on the plumbing. On the unglamorous, decisive work of getting the right parts to the right place at the right cost, again and again.
That’s the dilemma the students will debate. It’s one I lived.
Why it matters
Marine electrification is still a young industry, and the questions we’ve had to answer — how to build a supply chain for a product category that barely existed — are the ones every founder in this space will face next. Having that work documented rigorously means the next builder doesn’t have to solve it from scratch.
If even a few students walk away thinking this is a category I could build in, the case will have done more for the mission than any boat we’ve launched.
My thanks to Prof. Shiril Saju, Prof. Nishant Kumar Verma, and IIM Bangalore for the rigour they brought to documenting this journey.
At Navalt, we are electrifying marine transport so we can have cleaner, quieter oceans.
We still have a long way to go.
Access the case study here:
Sandith Thandasherry 
Yes, Sandith JI, “MILES OF SMILES” & Rewarding for Mankind across the Globe. Nature will be Blessed as there is NIL CO2 emission. a New Era in the ‘Global Maritime Arena’ . Great Going Sir, My Best Wishes….
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