A unique academic network nurtures innovation among India's poor
Ahmedabad, India
Mansukhbhai Patel, a hard-working farmer with a 10th-grade
education, has revolutionized the cotton industry here in the western
Indian state of Gujarat. Had it not been for a chance meeting with a
college student, the cotton-stripping machine Mr. Patel invented might
never have been a success.
That student put Mr. Patel in touch with Anil Gupta, a management
professor at one of the country's elite Indian Institutes of Management
and the founder of an unconventional academic project. An evangelical
supporter of grassroots innovations, Mr. Gupta is on a mission to
ensure that rural inventors like Mr. Patel can commercialize their
creations. To make that happen, Mr. Gupta founded the Honey Bee
Network, a scouting team of sorts, in which academics, scientists,
graduate students, farmers, and artisans seek out and nurture the
tinkerers, mechanics, and self-taught scientists in villages and small
towns across India.
The network, formed in 1987, has discovered Amrutbhai Agrawat and
his tilting bullock-cart, which greatly enhances efficiency in
spreading manure on small fields; Mansukhbhai Jagani's modified
motorcycle, which has attachments for tilling, weeding, and sowing;
Kalpesh Gujjar's small, energy-saving seed-oil extractor with a novel
gearbox; and Arvindbhai Patel's water chiller that uses no electricity.
All of those men are rural workers whose original goal was simply to make backbreaking work a little easier.
"Poor people have to be inventive to survive," says Mr. Gupta, "and
the elite often fail to recognize that the poor are knowledge-rich, and
that is a vital resource for any community and economy." Clad in a
knee-length, hand-woven shirt called a kurta, white pajama pants, and
sandals, he looks more like a zealous social activist than a professor
at a university that turns out future corporate executives.
Readers in the developed world may question why a new
cotton-stripping machine is needed when Eli Whitney's cotton gin
revolutionized the industry more than 200 years ago. But Mr. Patel
faced a problem characteristic of this region.
Farmers here grow a tough variety of cotton, called V-797, that does
not need much water and can withstand the harsh, arid climate. While
most hybrid varieties produce balls of cotton that can be picked
directly from the plant, this indigenous variety produces sturdy pods
that do not open easily to let loose the fibers within.
Instead, the pods must be picked off the plant and cracked manually
to extract the fibers. This is a tedious and time-consuming task
performed by women and children, who often cannot pick all of the
cotton before seasonal rains arrive. Traditional handpicking methods
also force children to work long hours in the field instead of
attending school.
Mr. Patel, a self-taught electrician and mechanic, started work on
his cotton-stripping machine in 1991. He made three models before
selecting the one that worked best, and he finished the first prototype
in 1992. The following year, he sold a number of them to local ginners
in his village of Nana Ubhada. But after a couple of months, a
wire-mesh plate in each machine broke, and the machines failed. Mr.
Patel stunned his customers, and the community, by giving the ginners
back their money and continuing to work on his invention. His
reputation as a dogged technician and an honest businessman grew.
'The Crazy Ones'
In 1995, Hirendra Rawal, a scout from the Honey Bee Network, was touring Nana Ubhada.
"The student scouts are given a clear mandate," says Mr. Gupta. "Go
from village to village and look for the oddballs, the crazy ones, the
ones who do something different and don't follow set patterns, the ones
with curiosity, who have come up with homegrown solutions for various
problems. And Hirendra kept hearing things about Mansukhbhai Patel,
mostly about his honesty and integrity, and also about his failed
machine."
Mr. Rawal met Mr. Patel and was intrigued by his machine. He wrote up his notes and showed them to Mr. Gupta.
"At the time a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology in
Bombay was visiting, and I took him along to meet Mansukhbhai, and he
said that with some alterations the cotton stripper would work just
fine," says Mr. Gupta.
Unlike many of the self-taught innovators the scouts came across, Mr. Patel was open-minded about getting help.
"Initially, many grassroots innovators don't like to talk about what
they do or give away their secrets," says Kamlesh Kumar Tawal, a scout.
"It takes a couple of visits to convince them that we are not here to
steal their ideas, but we are here to help them take the ideas forward
and give them credit for it."
Mr. Patel had no such misgivings. "Taking help is a good thing, and
I don't consider it beneath me. I knew things would get better when
they came to me," he says about the Honey Bee Network.
Soon after he met Mr. Patel, Mr. Gupta heard from Ahmedabad's elite
National Institute of Design that a German exchange student wanted to
work on design innovations in a rural area. The student ended up
staying with Mr. Patel as they worked together on a new machine. A
final model, built in 1999, worked perfectly.
"It was interesting working with a professional but also a bit
strange," recalls the genial Mr. Patel. "I visualize a model in my head
and then I make it. But the professionals sit at their computer or with
pencil and paper and draw and redraw things before they actually make
something."
Before he started the Honey Bee Network, Mr. Gupta was a consultant
for the Bangladesh government and helped farmers there use technology
to improve yields and working conditions. He says that job left him
dissatisfied. "I wrote all these papers, having used their grassroots
knowledge, and I got this ... [very high] salary, but I never gave
anything back. I felt quite guilty. Maybe it is the Indian mentality."
So he decided to help rural innovators by securing intellectual
property rights for them and publicizing their inventions. He explains
how he came up with the name of his network: "I had in mind the
metaphor of honeybees that collect nectar from flowers without
impoverishing them, and in turn, the bees aid pollination and
diversity."
In 1993 the Honey Bee Network was renamed the Society for Research
and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions, or
Sristi. Students in the society write case studies of particular
inventions and publish them in Honey Bee magazine, which was
initially supported by the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad,
but now operates independently and is published in eight languages.
Set for Life
In 1997 Mr. Gupta and his organization helped form the Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network, or GIAN.
"We realized that we were cataloging all these innovations and
helping the grassroots innovators, but we weren't equipped to take
these innovations forward," says Mr. Gupta, who convinced the
government of the State of Gujarat, where his institute is located, to
contribute $230,000 to what eventually became a business incubator.
"Back then we called it a trust, but turns out it was India's first
microventure incubation fund," chuckles Mr. Gupta. "All these concepts
became buzzwords much later, but we were thinking about them even
before that."
GIAN gave Mr. Patel $5,100 to start commercial production of the
cotton stripper, and the first sales were made in 2000. Three years
later GIAN helped Mr. Patel obtain a U.S. patent. Last year he won
India's National Research Development Corporation technology award for
best innovation.
Today this former amateur technician, who was once chided by his
wife for his "crazy pursuits," earns nearly $7,000 a year -- a lot of
money in India, where the average yearly income is $350. To ensure that
sales don't stagnate, he has made energy-saving and capacity-enhancing
improvements on his machine twice since 2000.
Ginners now are replacing their old machines, so sales remain
steady. Mr. Patel has moved out of his village house and built a home
about 40 miles from Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat. His new house
has air-conditioning, and he has also bought a car.
"I have a computerlike mind. If I had become an engineer, I would be
working with microprocessors today, but I am happy," says Mr. Patel,
beaming. "My children are now set for life, and my wife doesn't scold
me anymore."
The ginners are equally pleased. "Before we had the machine, we
could produce only 20 kilos of cotton in an hour; now we can do 350
kilos in an hour," says Prabhubhai Thakkar, a ginner in a nearby
district, who owns six of Mr. Patel's machines. "I used to produce only
400 to 500 bales of cotton, but now I produce 30,000 bales a year."
Mr. Gupta has been productive as well. Five years ago he convinced
the Indian government to set up the National Innovations Foundation,
with an endowment of $4.6-million. The interest on that money is used
to support his network and finance grassroots innovations throughout
the country.
"There is a lot of work to be done," says the professor, who, in
addition to coordinating these multiple ventures, teaches four courses
at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. (Most professors
teach only two.) "I need to have more work to do than there is time to
do it, " he says with a smile.
He has his wish. The foundation has so far documented 51,000
mechanical, technical, and herbal inventions and practices in more than
300 Indian districts. "Now we have to keep scouting and enabling all
these innovators," says Mr. Gupta. Mr. Patel and his ilk will no doubt
keep him busy.
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Section: International
Volume 52, Issue 6, Page A43
