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Very soon, condoms may be thinner, stronger, and will hopefully provide people with a stronger incentive to wrap it up. Thanks to the The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which threw open a challenge in March aiming to find innovators to build the Next Generation Condom. From 812 applicants, the foundation has picked 11 winners, of whom one is from India.

Each of these innovators gets $100,000 in grant money, with the promise of up to $1 million more if they can actually make these ideas happen. An Indian has been shortlisted among the 11 innovators.

Lakshminarayanan Ragupathy of HLL Lifecare in Thiruvananthapuram and his team are up against six researchers from the US, two from the UK and one each from South Africa and Australia, reports The Economic Times. Formerly Hindustan Latex, HLL churns out 1.6 billion condoms a year, but Raghupathy believes that graphene could be the answer to become the largest condom manufacturing company in the world.

So, why graphene?

Graphene, a one-atom thick layer of the mineral graphite, was first isolated in 2004 and is one of the strongest and lightest materials in the world. Its use in composite materials ranges from automobile construction to computer chips, and from Kevlar vests to smartphones. “Graphene has a large surface area – one gram is sufficient to cover half a football field – so it can be loaded with drugs,” Raghupathy tells ET. He says that with the use of graphene the thickness of the condom can also reduce to less than .04 mm. If Raghupathy and his team gets this right in 18 months, it could the biggest innovation in condom manufacturing in over 50 years.