roorkee polymer scientists at iitroorkee have claimed to have developed an indigenous technology to develop biobased packaging colour materials they said with the use of their technology making counterfeit packaging of any product would be highly difficulta peerreviewed scientific journal acs applied nano materials has published their study in its recent issue to fulfill their objective of a biobased technology researchers used bagasse an agrowaste sugarcane and organic acids oas like citric malic and tartaric acids etc after extracting from orange apple and tamarindtill now the provision of barcodes is being made available by the packaging industry of any product to stop the counterfeit practices however barcodes can also be counterfeited but our technology is secured from counterfeit as our packaging sensors colour materials are transparent in nature and can only be detected after use of uv light a marketavailable uv torchlight will be helpful in detecting the colour as a code on a strip pasted on the packaging wrappers said prof pradip k maji principal investigator pi of the projectthe other researchers associated with this project were chhavi verma saurabh k kardam monika chhajed and upendranath nandiaccording to chhavi verma they obtained cellulose nanocrystal cnc films from bagasse and added layers of different oas under many stages of laboratory process by this they got flexible and transparent films that displayed good visual coloursensing properties with moderate antibacterial activity for escherichia coli bacteriathis process is divided into stages of bleaching raw fibre and acid hydrolysis of cellulose pulp under standardized conditions the final cnc suspension is then concentrated to make it behave as a liquid crystal material showing birefringence splitting of light properties she addedthe cnc of bagasse has an inherent quality of colours but that cannot be seen with naked eyes researchers have obtained the desired colour through modification techniques of biopolymers after adding oas in layer by layer assembly the researchers have succeeded in making packaging sensors for blue and red colours so far and other sensors are still underway in the institutes laboratory at saharanpurbased campusapart from the fact that it is an intelligent packaging material it does not have the quality of any toxicbased material ultimately a cost to the environment we are receiving offers for technology transfer from local packaging industries after publication of our research paper but before going to technology transfer dissemination we have to get the first patent on our technology said maji