In India, need is the mother of invention

Desperately poor, often illiterate citizens dream up ideas by the thousands, hoping to strike it rich

Mansukhbai Patel, 58, has invented a machine that dramatically cuts the cost of stripping cotton from its husks.

RICK WESTHEAD/TORONTO STAR

By Rick Westhead South Asia Bureau

WANKANER, INDIA–Mansukh Prajapati is a potter with vision.

In the months after his farming community near the Pakistan border was rocked by an earthquake in January 2001, Prajapati had an idea.

Electricity in this village had been sketchy before the quake and now it was practically non-existent, making it nearly impossible to keep food from rotting in the heat.

Prajapati ‘s solution: an electricity-free fridge made from clay.

No PhD is required to understand his technology. As water stored on top of the fridge evaporates, the compartment below cools. In a country where 40 per cent of produce rots en route to market, undone by bad roads and India’s heat, this refrigerator can keep five kilograms of produce and milk fresh for about a week.

There are plenty more inventors like Prajapati throughout the subcontinent. India’s National Innovation Foundation (NIF), has amassed a database of 140,000 innovations and inventions over the past decade, ideas dreamed up by illiterate farmers, factory workers, auto rickshaw drivers and others.

In 2007-08, the foundation catalogued 60,000 start-ups, including a pomegranate de-seeder, a cheap, portable infant incubator, a bamboo-framed bike and a new type of vegetable-based paint designed especially for children’s’ toys.

“There are invention hotspots all over our country,” said foundation head Anil Gupta. “People with so little have so much creativity.”

Over a dinner of chipati, rice and stewed vegetables in one of his two homes in Wankaner, Prajapati, rail-thin with a gleaming smile, sells a fridge every day for $57 – $5 more than it costs to make one.

A one-time labourer who was paid just 23 Canadian cents a day, the 42-year-old now earns roughly $1,150 a month on the sales of his fridge and non-stick clay frying pans, another of his inventions. He’s gone from poverty and hunger to take big-city vacations to Mumbai, New Delhi and Jaipur.

“I had to quit school because my father didn’t have enough money for classes,” he said, “and now I have my son live in a hostel away from home so he commits himself to school and doesn’t think about quitting to work with me.”

Inventing has never enjoyed a higher profile in India and the country’s popular movie industry has taken notice.

The recent Bollywood film 3 Idiots took India by storm and fuelled further debate of the national inventive potential. It starred film icon Aamir Khan and is based on a trio of real-life inventors who dreamed up creations such as a scooter-powered flourmill, a cycle-powered horse shaver and an exercycle-cum-washing machine.

Since 3 Idiots was released on Christmas Day, newspapers and Indian TV are providing blanket coverage of the country’s grassroots inventors, said Ranjan Roy, a senior editor with the Times of India newspaper.

A four-hour drive from Prajapati’s dimly lit pottery workshop, Mansukhbai Patel may be India’s poster child for unlikely inventive ambition.

The 58-year-old grew up working in the cotton fields of Gujurat. At 20, he agreed to his mother’s plea that he quit school to help support his seven younger siblings and he began work in a textile mill.

Much of the organic cotton grown in India is so-called dryland cotton. Unlike genetically modified cotton and hybrid varieties, organic cotton doesn’t fully open when it blooms. That means it has to be separated by hand – a long, tedious process.

Patel invented the prototype for a machine that would separate the cotton from its husk using nails. It worked, but not well or often enough. He switched from nails to a wire brush, and that worked better. But the brush wore out too often.

Patel’s big break came when, on his 13th model, he replaced the brush with a metal band that looks like a fan belt with a jagged edge.

It worked. “We haven’t had one wear out yet,” he said.

Now, his company generates about $450,000 a year selling the $9,000 cotton-stripping machines.

“It’s changed the whole cotton industry,” Gupta said excitedly.

Not only has Patel’s machine cut the cost of separating cotton by 20 times to 1 Canadian cent per 10 kg of raw cotton, it’s also freed up children to attend school during the three-month harvesting and separating season.

“Usually, it’s the kids and the elderly who do this work, so the kids go back to class with a machine doing (the work),” Gupta said.

While Gupta’s foundation has done a thorough job documenting new ideas, it remains difficult for inventors and innovators, particularly the 700 million Indians who live in rural villages, to access seed money for projects.

“The ideas are there; people are so desperate to make money and you see much more risk-taking than you would in Canada,” said Veena Ravichandran, a senior program officer with Canada’s International Development Research Centre.

The centre, Ravichandran said, last year provided the innovation foundation with $350,000 over three years to study how access to capital can be improved for Indian grassroots inventors.

As dusk settled on the town of Wankaner, Prajapati headed for his workshop for a few more hours of tinkering. He apologized for a few moments of silence, during which he seemed to be deep in thought.

“I’m working on a clay pressure cooker,” he said. “It could be very big.”

Anil K Gupta