BU mechanical engineering student Sanika D. Barve is studying fabric rings head carriers use
By Andrew Thurston
Every summer as a kid, Sanika D. Barve would leave her home in Cincinnati to spend a few months with her grandparents in Pune, India. She’d hang out with family, travel, go to classes—and shop with her grandmother at the local bazaar. As she ran from stall to stall, Barve would swerve between women balancing baskets on their heads that were brimming with food and household products: mangoes, sugar cane, books, and even bricks.
Years later, making the same trip as an adult—and as a doctoral student in Boston University’s College of Engineering—Barve wondered how the women did it. How did they carry such heavy loads while pivoting around crowds of shoppers and dodging dashing children? What role did the fabric rings she’d noticed they wore on their heads—almost like crowns—have in distributing the weight and cushioning the loads?
Barve (ENG’25) decided finding out would make the perfect engineering research project. For the past two years, she’s been studying how different types of fabric rings—some twisted, some simply wrapped—help people carry a variety of loads on their heads, from heavy pots of water to ever-shifting bags of rice.