Innovating our way out of underdevelopment -- The Indian example

Asia Times Online (29 January 2010)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA29Df03.html

India's rural inventors drive change

By Raja Murthy

MUMBAI - Mansukh Prajapati invented a first-of-a-kind refrigerator that is made out of terracotta, works without electricity, costs US$53 and is selling in the thousands. It's a sample of an innovation wave from rural and small-town India enriching the world with common-sense products.

Anil Gupta, a professor at India's premier business school, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, leads a pioneering tribe of technocrats working for no-frills change at the mass level, by harnessing knowledge wealth from economically weaker sections of society.

"Being economically poor does not mean being knowledge-poor," Gupta told Asia Times Online. "But the poor who are at the bottom of the economic pyramid are often considered as being at the bottom of the knowledge pyramid as well. Nothing could be further from the truth."

To prove the truth that wisdom does not depend on university degrees, Gupta's 21-year-old Honey Bee Network has compiled an unprecedented database of 140,000 innovations created by farmers, villagers and small-town inventors. Many have no formal education or technical training. Teams of Honey Bee volunteers scout across India to hunt out local innovations, inventions and traditional knowledge practices.

The Honey Bee Network of rural and small-town inventors, academics, scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers and volunteers gather, pool, develop and share know-how from a mass-based, much-ignored source. India's heart beats in its villages, and the country is entering a phase of listening to its heartbeat.

Gupta, who is also a visiting professor of innovation management in emerging markets at the European Business School, Frankfurt, Germany, coordinates the Honey Bee Network. In turn, the network connects with other supporting agencies in India, such as the National Innovation Foundation, Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions, the Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network, Innovation Club and the Network of Rural Universities.

The inter-connected agencies help test grassroots inventions, file for patents, find investors to develop, produce and market eco-friendly, cheaper new products. The small inventors have a chance to profit from their creativity.

"Most of the innovations in our database are open source and shared freely," said Gupta. "But if needed, we help innovators file for patents for innovations that are commercially viable." He points to Honey Bee inventors even procuring patents in the United States, with its strict patents regimen, proving the quality of technical talent available at the grassroots level.

Prajapati, a clay potter from the western state of Gujarat, is a typical success case from this new tribe of innovators with supporting angels to guide them to commercially producing their inventions.

Prajapati invented low-cost refrigeration in a country where the fridge remains out of reach of lower, middle-income groups and the poor. The Mitti Cool, made out of terracotta, an unglazed clay-based ceramic, uses an age-old practice still common in India of earthen-clay pots keeping water refreshingly below room temperature. Prajapati developed the earthen pot-cooling effect to produce a fridge that keeps food, vegetables, even milk, fresh for days, requires no maintenance, needs no electricity and costs $53, with shipping charges extra.

Prajapati's bigger success is his $1 non-stick frying pan made out of clay. It's a healthier, safer, cheaper version of non-stick utensils compared with the conventional teflon-coated chemical variety.

Gupta, who in 2007 became an honorary professor at China's Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, says cost-effective, locally sustainable grassroots innovation is the way forward to source new technologies and ideas in a global economy, to serve more people.

"It is now realized that mere reliance on market forces will not work to fill innovation gaps or to disseminate innovative ideas, products and services among disadvantaged segments of the population," says Gupta's nine-page paper "Grassroots Green Innovations for Inclusive Sustainable Development".

Such sustainable, ready-to-order inventions from the Honey Bee database range across 34 categories. They include agricultural tools and techniques, water conservation, health, education innovation, food and nutrition, traditional medicines and industrial and household goods.

Farmer Mansukh Jagani invented a motorcycle-driven ploughing machine for fields in a drought-hit region where most farmers can barely afford tractors or bullocks. Uttam Patil invented matchsticks made of natural fibers sourced from agricultural waste.

Bachu Thesia invented a long-lasting electric bulb that withstands short-circuits. When thieves began pinching the cost-saving bulbs from households and fields, Thesia inserted a slip of paper with the name of the owner into the glass bulb to help identify those that were stolen.

The Honey Bee Network, which has a presence in 75 countries, aims to prevent exploitation of traditional knowledge; multinational biotechnology corporations, for example, are accused of patenting traditional Indian medicinal knowledge such as neem and turmeric.

"Honey Bee, true to its metaphor, has been the source of pollination and cross-pollination of ideas, creativity and grassroots genius, without taking away the nectar from the flower forever," says the introductory note on the Honey Bee website.

Thousands of such ideas and products are feeding other innovation networks across India. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai, part of the globally renowned IIT centers established across India, operates the "Rural Technology & Business Incubator" agency to "design, develop, and bring about innovations that would fit to most of our rural needs".

Digital Green, a Microsoft Research India project, helps increase the productivity of small farmers through low-cost information exchange, such as personal interactions among farmers and with experts. Digital Green videotapes agricultural improvements by farmers in a village and shares the innovations with other villages. The You-Tube-like information sharing aims to help small farmers across the developing world.

Highly qualified technocrats work with farmers for mutual benefit. Bangalore-based Digital Green's chief executive, Rikin Gandhi, for instance, is a computer engineer with a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born and brought up in the US, Gandhi represents a reverse-migration back to India, to help serve the country at the grassroots level.

Such change could happen faster with greater corporate common sense. Gupta said one of the major challenges was convincing big companies to invest in research and development in grassroots inventions and benefit from them.

Companies that take the plunge are making their investors happy. Mumbai-based Marico, makers of the popular Parachute coconut oil brand, found a farmer in the south Indian state of Kerala who invented a device to more safely and quickly climb coconut trees to pick the lucrative nuts.

Marico chief executive Harsh Mariwala teamed up with India's Coconut Development Board to turn the prototype into a commercially viable machine, according to a Harvard Business Review posting dated April 13, 2009. Marico then used its nation-wide network to distribute the machine to its hundreds of coconut oil suppliers. Coconut oil productivity increased, as have Marico's profits, which surged to $40.6 million last June from $12.6 million five years earlier.

Other innovation networks with a rural base are thriving across the country. The Chennai city-based Villagro calls itself a "mass transformation movement with singular objective: to create a prosperous rural India, buzzing with ideas for growth, and transform rural lives through innovations". Villagro says it has activated nearly 1,500 innovations since 2001, and benefited more than 130,000 lives in rural India.

Navi Radjou, executive director of the Center for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, noticed the innovation wave during a recent trip to India. "What struck us most during this field trip is that most Indian innovators - both large and small - are now single-mindedly targeting the rural market, which accounts for 70% of India's population," Radjou said in the Harvard Business Review this month.

Radjou, who previously led the Forrester Research team on global innovation, calls for "turbocharging" India's growth by building a National Innovation Network, with public-private partnerships between grassroots entrepreneurs and large corporations.

Innovation gurus such as Professor Gupta are emphatic about grassroots knowledge bridging social and economic divides. "Some people think in terms of surviving the next day, while others have the luxury of being able to plan for the next century," he says. "When these time horizons converge, we will have a society in which the skills, knowledge and resources in which poor people are rich are validated more fully."

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Cancel Haiti's Debt

Published on Thursday, January 28, 2010 by YES! Magazine

Cancel Haiti's Debt

There's a growing movement to cancel Haiti's foreign debt as a way to return to the Haitian people the authority to rebuild their lives and their country.

by Sarah van Gelder

Haiti has a painful history with debt. When it won its independence in 1804 - just the second country in the hemisphere to do so - it was required to pay restitution to France. Haiti went millions of dollars (billions in today's dollars) into debt to compensate the French for their loss of property - including the lost profits from slave trading. Only by paying this restitution could Haiti end a crippling embargo by the French, British, and Americans. Money that the new government might have invested in building a new nation poured into loan payments that continued until the loan was paid off in 1947.

Today, in the wake of the earthquake that has flattened Port-au-Prince and killed more than 150,000, there is a quickly growing movement to forgive Haiti's nearly $1 billion debt, and to insure that aid to earthquake victims takes the form of grants, not more loans.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced this week that he is canceling Haiti's $295 million debt to Petrocaribe, Venezuela's energy regional energy distributor. "Haiti has no debt with Venezuela - on the contrary, it is Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti," Chavez said. Chavez was referring to Haiti's historic assistance to Simón Bolívar, who led Venezuela's war of independence.

Also this week, the anti-poverty group, One, handed over a petition with 150,000 signatures to the International Monetary Fund. The petition asks that the IMF cancel Haiti's $165 million debt repayment obligation when the board meets later this week. "Swift action by the IMF would increase momentum and pressure on all creditors," One said in a statement.

The head of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, plans to bring a plea for debt cancellation to the World Economic Summit meeting in Davos, Switzerland, later this week.

Noting that more than half of Haiti's debt stemmed from loans extended to the "brutal father-son dictatorship of Francois ('Papa Doc') and Jean-Claude ('Baby Doc') Duvalier," a WCC statement says: "Many of these loans did not benefit the people of Haiti. The Duvaliers appropriated tens of millions from the national treasury in their almost 30-year stay in power from 1957-1986."

The WCC also warned the IMF against "imposing detrimental economic policy conditions on the country such as the privatization of public services." Such conditions are frequently part of IMF and World Bank lending, and advocates for the poor point out that those conditions frequently undermine democratic governance and economic well-being.

The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a brand new organization, has posted a petition that likewise calls for the cancellation of debt.

Jubilee USA, a group that has led other debt cancellation efforts, called on President Obama to press international lending agencies to make grants, not loans, and to place a moratorium on all debt payments. "All of Haiti's limited resources should be directed at recovery, not repayment," the group said in a statement.

Natural disasters and human suffering should not be used to open doors to outside interference in Haitian affairs, which history tells us would extend the suffering. Debt is one of the key ways that such influence is often accomplished, along with military occupation and the "shock doctrine" author Naomi Klein so clearly describes.

Dr. Joia Mukherjee, of Paul Farmer's famous group, Partners in Health, described what was needed during a conference call on Tuesday: The solutions to Haiti's problems will come from the Haitian people and from the government they choose, she said. "The greatest resource of Haiti is the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people," she said. But they must be unshackled from international debt.

Note: My January 13 blog lists organizations that need your donations to help the Haitian people.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Sarah van Gelder is the Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.

Haiti Phoenix a Clearing House of Ideas

In the wake of the devastating January 12 earthquake, I have reactivated my one-year old blog, Haiti Phoenix. It has laid dormant these last nine months, its solitary post accusatorily pricking my guilty conscience. Now is the time to awake it from its inexcusable slumber.

As Haitians turn to the task of reconstruction of their devastated physical, social, and economic landscape with their legendary stoicism, what they will need more than anything else will be ideas, imaginative solutions to the many challenges the country has been facing in these last two centuries.

To stimulate the collective imagination and inspire action, I am turning Haiti Phoenix into a clearing house of ideas. Once a week I will be posting information garnered from my readings and from various web sources in the hope that such information might prove useful to organizations and individuals involved in the arduous enterprise of nation building. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. Many of the ideas posted on Haiti Phoenix will have been tried and applied elsewhere, in social, economic, political, and cultural contexts similar to the Haitian milieu.

I welcome contributions from Haitian compatriots and others who wish to share their own or others’ ideas for the resurrection of Haiti with Haiti Phoenix readers.

Please send your comments and texts to christophehenry1@hotmail.com .

Rebuilding Haiti's Earthquake Struck Cities: Shipping Containers Turned Into Beautiful Homes

Young firm turns shipping containers into home
Sept. 23, 2008 01:19 PMThe Associated Press

CORRALES, N.M. - It was a side trip through a destitute, ramshackle neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that detoured Brian McCarthy from building houses in Albuquerque to an idea to offer the very poor a chance to own a home. His answer lies in a humble steel shipping container, 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, 8 1/2 feet tall.

McCarthy, 30, and three partners, Pablo Nava, 22; Kyle Annen, 23; and Mackenzie Bishop, 22, have made a prototype out of a standard shipping container that hauls goods worldwide - a 320-square-foot home with a kitchen, bath with toilet, sleeping areas, windows and a bright blue door. The exterior is painted with a white epoxy coating that has light-reflecting properties to prevent the sun's heat from penetrating. Each small house includes hookups for air conditioning, ventilation, electrical and water systems - and the units ideally could be set up in small communities to make accessing utilities more efficient.

The idea began to take shape several years ago, when McCarthy went to the Mexican border city on a field trip as part of an executive MBA program. He found himself impressed by the sophistication and rapid growth of industry in Juarez, but shocked when the bus cut through a poor neighborhood on the way out of the city.

"We saw hundreds of homes that are made out of wood pallets and cardboard and scrap metal and scrap building material," McCarthy said. When he questioned the bus driver, "he said, Well, all the people who live here work in the places you just visited.'" "It was amazing to me that in an area where there was such growth and economic prosperity, that these employees of Fortune 1000 companies were living in such poor conditions." With Juarez growing by 50,000 to 60,000 people a year and wages low, it was evident traditional homebuilding couldn't respond, said McCarthy, who'd worked in various facets of building homes in Albuquerque. An idea began taking shape about a year and a half later when he saw an article about a shipping container converted into guest quarters.

"They talked about the merits of the construction, how strong they are, how affordable they are, and how plentiful they are," McCarthy said. He called Nava, his cousin, with the low-cost home idea. A year later, Nava, then a junior at Notre Dame University, suggested entering the university's business plan competition. Their initial three-quarter page concept expanded as they advanced in the contest. Along the way, Nava invited his roommate, Annen, to join. As the group's acknowledged computer graphics whiz, Annen added drawings to give the presentation more life. Eventually, they won the contest with a 55-page document, illustrated by renderings and floor plans.

In July 2007, the partners formed PFNC Global Communities - PFNC stands for "Por Fin, Nuestra Casa," which roughly translates as "Finally, our own home." They operate out of a back room in a Corrales realty firm but eventually expect offices in Juarez or adjacent El Paso, Texas, and a Juarez plant to manufacture shipping container homes. The house faces two constraints: designing in only 320 square feet and keeping the price to around $8,000 to be affordable for the average worker at maquiladoras, manufacturing plants in Mexico along the U.S. border, McCarthy said.

The partners looked at clever designs for small condos and lofts, travel trailers and even private jet planes, adapting ideas they felt would work. "We started with a kitchen and bathroom because they're the most necessary and most basic ingredients of a home," McCarthy said. They designed a galley-style kitchen with a stove, sink, refrigerator and dinette, and a 48-square-foot bathroom with a pedestal sink, shower and commode. Adjacent to the kitchen is a bunk area for children; separate sleeping quarters for the owners lie behind the bathroom wall.

The house may be sparse by U.S. standards, but Nava said it's a huge improvement in safety, security and health over where many now live. When drawings and color pictures of the prototype were shown around a poor Juarez neighborhood, people said, "You know it'd be like a dream to live in one of these," Nava said. "You know, just the thought of having nice fresh air ventilating through the house, a large bed ... a normal kitchen and a safe home that locks and closes each night was more than appealing." Annen cites modern architectural design, with bare metal and piping. "This would fit right in any major city," he said.

The company has received a commitment for equity investment and is in the process of finishing details and closing its first round of funding. The partners anticipate starting production early next year, with the capacity to produce 3,000 homes in the first year and later ramping up. They figure a half million people could benefit from such homes in Juarez alone. PFNC doesn't intend just to build shelter. It wants to build communities, and McCarthy said the group expects to have the first pilot community on the ground late next year.

"That was our goal, more than just four walls and a roof but to kind of raise the standard of living in Juarez and other places," Nava said.

The shipping containers, which can be hauled by truck, rail or ship, are designed to stack. PFNC envisions a cluster arrangement, eight side by side and four high, with apartment-type balconies and staircases in the corners. Clusters could be arranged into squares, creating "a safe little plaza in the middle where we hope to build a soccer field or a playground, some safe area for families to be," Nava said.

PFNC wants to set up programs with maquiladoras to offer housing as an employee benefit, helping cut the high rate of worker turnover, now between 7 percent and 10 percent a month, McCarthy said. The company is working with a Mexican law firm that has handled work-to-own housing programs. "This is not a rental-type situation or free housing while you work here," McCarthy said. "Rather, the employer takes on some of the burden in setting up the financing program to transfer ownership to the employee." That's important because PFNC needs large orders to keep costs down so low-wage workers can afford the home. The incentive for employers: Studies show housing for employees dramatically increases retention, and having more workers in a given area will reduce the number of buses maquiladoras run to take people to and from their jobs.

PFNC doesn't view its homes as the last stop. "With our design and with our price point, we think we'll at least be able to take the first step of getting more families into more homes" and formal property ownership, McCarthy said. "We fully anticipate that people will move into our homes, build up some equity, sell this home," he said. "We see this is a stepping stone to get into a bigger or more comfortable home."

AP photo/Courtesy of PFNC Global Communities The container azcentral.comhttp://www.azcentral.com/business/consumer/articles/2008/09/23/20080923biz-containerhomes23-ON.html

Hexayurt Project: Cheap and Durable Emergency Housing for Earthquake Struck Haiti

Housing is one of the most pressing among the many problems faced by the Haitian population in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. Rebuilding the capital and the provincial cities destroyed by the cataclysm is an enterprise that will last decades. In the meantime, tens of thousands of homeless people have to be housed.

Here is one inexpensive and practical solution to this urgent housing problem.

As emergency shelter for all those displaced people who have suddenly become homeless, the Hexayurt seems to be an excellent option. It is inexpensive, sturdy, and easy to construct.

Go to the Hexayurt Project's website for more information:

http://hexayurt.com/

I ask readers to circulate this information. An enterprising organization might just act on it.

Christophe Henry