Gupta anil k, 2009

Inclusive Innovations for Stimulating Sustainable and Equitable Growth in
‘THE INNOVATION FOR DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2009-2010, Strengthening Innovation for the Prosperity of the Nations, ed. AUGUSTO LOPEZ-CLAROS, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, p 300

earlier draft:

Learning from Grassroots Green Innovations for inclusive sustainable development:  Looking inside out

Anil K Gupta[1]

Open innovation model[2] or user driven innovation[3] models have been recognized as an important way forward even by traditional large companies which  relied for long on internal R&D as a major source of innovations.   Not only are these companies  often not able to meet the needs of existing clients from within, they are also constrained in their ability  to identify and meet the needs of excluded clients. Notwithstanding the fertility of this platform to generate solutions to many problems, corporate  ability to influence the lives of common people by a variety of  products and services has not increased in the recent past.  It is now realized that mere reliance on market forces will not work for articulation of the innovation gaps or for disseminating innovative ideas, products and services among the disadvantaged social segments.  Thus, there seems to be a crisis about (a) sourcing of ideas which can add value to the existing knowledge, (b) for disseminating innovations in a manner that users can adapt the ideas to their location-specific context and (c) for co-creating the solutions for future that will maintain ecological integrity, and social stability by providing opportunities for improving life to the most disadvantaged communities. I am excluding the applications of open source softwares / free softwares networks here because I want to restrict  to the hard technologies needed by knowledge rich-economically poor people.

 I argue in this paper that Honey Bee Network approach offers new ways of thinking which can help even the organized sector learn from grassroots innovators and traditional knowledge holders for solving problems in an affordable, accountable  and accessible manner.

 There are three arguments that I put forward here (i) the lack of material resources spurs knowledge intensive innovations by common people in informal sector and thus provide a basis for sustainability by reducing entropy,  (ii) many of the grassroots innovations are important not only because these are low cost and maintainable at local level but also because they offer new heuristics which can be applied in different contexts and  (iii) several of these innovations can be blended as such or after pooling ideas of different innovators or communities with formal sector scientific and technological knowledge to develop value added products/services.   If social inclusion has to take place, then the existing assumptions of the dominant developmental models will have to be changed.  The role of the state and the civil society will need to be redefined along with the role of corporations.  The classical model of corporate social responsibility will not work in the future because one cannot first create exclusion and then hope to do something for the left out.  The strategies for inclusive development will have to build upon the resources in which poor people are rich, i.e., their knowledge, values, social network and institutions.  Not all of these factors may be equally strong or relevant in every case.   However, without recognizing the role of these factors, my contention is that inclusive social development may not be achieved.

In part one of the paper I trace the nature as a source of sustainability logic in grassroots innovations. The scope of learning from variety of green grassroots innovations mobilized by Honey Bee network is discussed in Part Two.

Part one

Towards a sustainability framework: learning from nature

Among various attributes of nature, frugality, multi-functionality, simultaneity and diversity are basic to sustainable resource use.  And yet, the institutions that govern the logistics of the modern world design packaging, transportation, inventory location and movement patterns disregard some of these features.  Part of the disjunction arises because of the way we view markets and their functions in a society where resources are assumed to be artificially abundant.  Recent crisis in financial markets has brought home the problem of divorcing the real commodity markets with the derivatives based on unrealistic assumptions.  Time to connect with nature within and without has come.

If 30 per cent of the consumption of goods produced in a rural hinterland is going to take place within, say 300 kms., or and within three months or less, should not the storage, packaging, transportation and the entire supply chain be redesigned accordingly.  In the search for optimal solutions for verticals, did we neglect the horizontals and therefore the connections among the communities?   The proximal transactions do not have to be analyzed through the prisms of remote supply chains.  Today most things are packed for longer-term storage, longer distance supplies and multiple points of handling.  In a mass consumption society, this was an efficiency imperative.   But, with changes in the energy and other resource constraints, our assumptions of designing logistical solutions must also undergo basic transformation.

It is here that the knowledge, values and institutions at grassroots level can perhaps come to our rescue.  In every culture, the neighbourhood economy has become weaker with the strengthening of vertical  markets.  Maintaining inventories individually always consumes more resources compared to community management. But then privacy of consumption is celebrated in vertical markets ( disregarding its social externalities),  social or community based/graded/ranked/or influenced consumption can generate more optimal solutions, but then changes in life styles are imperative. It has to be  accepted that one has to pay a price for autonomy, flexibility and freedom.  Excessive resource consumption is a price we pay for unregulated freedom.  However, can we moderate our need for autonomy in the short run for gaining more autonomy in the long run?  Car pooling, collective purchases of household goods, shared responsibilities for collective goods and services, etc., have already begun to happen in many cultures in response to sustainability challenge.  From small scale, scattered and spontaneous steps, we have to make a transition to large scale, systematic and organized changes in the way we design our future.

There are several elements of these changes that are required at multiple levels.

1.              Frugality:  When I was a child, a shopkeeper would often give things wrapped in a piece of old newspaper tied with a thread.  There were no plastics and even paper bags were costly and used only for heavy things.  Once the things were brought home, my grand father would advise that paper be spread and kept under the bed on the wooden cot and the thread hung on a nail.  All for reuse next time.  If package did not have to travel long, why use materials having life longer than what was necessary.  Over the years, the natural resources have reduced but our scale of consumption and our footprints have not.  The design of packaging material, shelves, transportation system and consumption patterns will undergo a change once different circles of production and consumption exchanges / networks are visualized over space and time.  Thus, only for long term and long distance consumption, one would use sturdy packaging material.  There will be another interesting spillover effect.  Once we start modifying the logistical chain, the community markets will start becoming competitive.  Face to face interaction among consumers and producers will take place more often.  The whole politics of regional and sectoral development will undergo a change.

2.              Multi-functionality:  Higher the multi-functionality, lesser the waste and better the resource utilization.  Most cultures in developing countries are multi-functional in their orientation.  Whenever goods and services are designed, multiple functions are kept in view.  This is evident from the grassroots user driven design of farm machineries and other utilities.  The skills, resources and tools for multi functional designs are quite different from the ones needed for specialized and single function goods and services.  There is generally a higher redundancy, resource wastage and consumption of energy in single purpose devices.  Multi functional devices and services may be able to build much higher feedback loops and thus reduce waste, ensure higher stability and justify better quality consumption.

3.              Simultaneity:  In nature, many exchanges and flows of goods, services and energy take place simultaneously in different directions.  Such exchanges require different kinds of logistical chains.  Future logistics systems will have to integrate anticipated disposal of recyclable, reusable, rejuvenable and the ones which cannot go through any of these three processes i.e., real junk.   In nature, the species which digest the biomass co-evolve with the biomass creating species.  The co-evolutionary model also includes human proclivities.  The logistical systems will have to mimic ecological exchanges in real time so that environmental load can be reduced and the sink and the source can be redesigned.  The Simultaneity of exchanges at the community level may give rise to innovations in pooling, sourcing, transportation, storage and consumption besides disposal.  The negative externality will always be a higher when all these transactions have to be optimized at individual consumer level (firm or individual).  Coordination of individual choices in the short run to expand the autonomous choices in the long run has to become the mantra of logistics.  For instance, the lack of coordination will lead to excessive individual inventory, more waste, more potential energy trapped in immobile resources and consequent higher cost of internalizing negative externality.  This is what is happening today.  With lower energy prices and higher savings, some societies could manage for the time being.  Situation is changing drastically and to some extent irreversibly.

4.              Diversity:  We can go to any shelf of vegetables or fruits in supermarkets, small shops, roadside vendors or even home delivery vendor.  One would invariably find only one or two varieties of any vegetable or fruit.  Even these varieties are bred for better shelf life and display, transportation, handling and storage.  If the taste and the nutrition suffer, so it be.   But that was not the articulated wish of the majority.  People would hopefully appreciate diverse taste, colour, shapes and aromas for aesthetic and nutritive purposes.  But irregularly shaped tomatoes perhaps are not considered beautiful.  The aesthetics has been defined by the logistics.  Once the diversity of the taste and consumption undergoes a basic shift, the incentives and pressures for conserving cultural diversity also reduce.  The world is beautiful because it is diverse.  But the agronomy, plant breeding, soil eco system health, human and animal health and working relationships will undergo complete transformation if diversity in consumption becomes the primary purpose of designing supply chains.  The means and ends have got confused.  It seems that the optimality of supply chain hinges crucially on sub-optimality of diversity in production and consumption system.  In due course, it would affect the health and nutrition adversely.  There are several other implications for logistics:  diversity of food, cloth with vegetative dyes and other materials would need to be characterized differently.  The entire labeling system will have to modified to include the characteristics of the habitat from which the resources are sourced.  Idea is to provide information to the consumer about degree of biodiversity in the habitats from which raw materials are sourced.  Since vegetative colours may not always be uniform, the consumer preferences will have to molded to prefer variable colours.  Just as markets created preference for uniform colour, taste, shape, texture, etc., the challenge in future is to do the opposite.  While doing so, the packaging and transporting logistics would have to be adapted to the new needs.  A whole range of technological innovations will be needed, for instance, to package the diverse fruits, vegetables and other materials.  Human needs and preferences for a sustainable world must guide and trigger technological innovations and consequent supply chains and logistical arrangements and not the other way around.  Time for re-definition of our logistical goals has come.

Konrad Lorenz, a famous German ethologist and noble laureate in a book based on his work (Reidl, 198[4]) gives a very interesting example of above conceptual framework.  He suggests that we should look at feathers of all the birds, fins of all the fish and branches of all the trees.  Let us look at the range of angles at which the feathers, fins and branches are set to the main trunk.  The entire diversity can, in fact, be covered by a range from 15 – 90 degrees.

Lorenz (quoted by Rupert Reidl) then says:  Nature has very few designs and it plays with them all the time. Obviously nature is very parsimonious (and frugal).  This is the essence.

Unless we discover simple principles which have to be incorporated in redesigning the logistical systems, the world around us will not starts becoming more humane, green, compassionate and collaborative.  The creativity and innovation will inevitably follow in the process of opening up the design and implementation process.  If such was not the case, large corporations would not turn towards users and other  supply chain members for ideas and innovations.  Around the world, corporations are recognising that it would be improper to confuse R&D system with the innovation system and innovations systems with intra-organisation creativity.

The same simplicity, frugality, multi-functionality and diversity is witnessed in many of the grassroots innovations. Why do these innovators imbibe the values emanating from the natural resource base on which they depend so much?

Part two: Learning from grassroots innovators

Learning from common people who are not trained formally in a technical institution, may even be illiterate and may not know much about scaling up is not so common today. Be it a public policy maker or a corporate chief, sourcing ideas from the ground isn’t the first thing that they would like to do for bringing about social transformation. Even in areas where technology does penetrate in many of the interior areas, such as cell phones, the applications that can bridge the knowledge and technology gaps often take much longer to come about if at all. Despite four hundred million cell phones sold in India in the last decade, we do not have even forty applications which will empower knowledge rich economically poor people to improve their lives, create markets for their cultural or artisanal skills or help them disseminate their successful local solutions. A camera fitted phone cannot be used to do a microscopic analysis of water, food or other items through modification in the image processing capacity or through other probes. One can recount a large number of examples where technology has not been tweaked to serve the larger social interest. Hence, either the designers of technologies or other services in the government or private sector do not learn from the people and understand their needs or they do not have a commitment to be more inclusive. It is also possible that some of them want to be inclusive but have not found a way of tapping into the creative potential of common people so that the social gap can be bridged.

If learning about developing new applications of existing technologies for social inclusion is so difficult, would not it be even more difficult to explore and value add in the innovations developed by the people without outside help. This disconnect becomes difficult to appreciate when one notices concerted effort by many large corporations, as mentioned earlier,  to use open innovation model to involve users in generating solutions for their problems. It is a different matter that solutions generated by the users are often used by the companies for developing commercial products without sharing any benefits with the solution or idea providers.

How can one bridge the gap between formal sector (private corporations, Public/R&D Institutions and other international developmental organizations) and the creative and innovative urges at grassroots level? What can be done to replicate the experience of Honeybee network in India in building bridges with Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)? How can private sector not only license-in the technologies developed by farmers, artisans, mechanics and other lay people but also share the benefits, give them credit and expand the creative abilities of common people.

The Honey bee network experience[5]:

More than twenty years ago, the Honey bee network started with primary four principles: (a) When we try to learn from common people, they should not remain anonymous. They should get due credit for their knowledge whether developed by individuals or communities, (b) We should try to connect people to people to cross fertilize their ideas just as Honeybees due cross pollination. This is possible when we communicate in local language, share our findings of what we did with the knowledge collected from the people and take their prior informed consent if the knowledge is unique, (c) if any commercial benefits accrue from the knowledge provided by people with or without value addition, a reasonable goes back to the people in a fair and just manner and (d) The process of knowledge exchange is  transparent though wherever people so desire, confidentiality is  maintained and their intellectual property rights are  respected.

These principles were developed even before the Convention on Biological Diversity had come about or other debates on people’s knowledge rights had started. In these two decades and more, the Honey Bee Network has grown from few hundred innovations and traditional knowledge practices to more than a hundred thousand innovations, ideas and traditional knowledge practices pooled in the National database on the subject maintained by National Innovation Foundation set up in 2000 ( not all unique of course or of  significant value). Five years ago formal agreements were signed with CSIR ( renewed for another five years recently) and three  years ago with ICMR. Outstanding results have been achieved proving that grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge can not only generate good solutions to local problems but also extend the frontiers of science in some cases. The scale of blending between formal and informal science, technology and innovation systems is likely to go up when NIF receives five times more resources( from a very low base , only about 400k usd fixed for nine years)  after it becomes an Institute of Department of Science and Technology, Government of India in a few weeks time. The resources may still be sub critical to bring about a significant change in the situation but even then it will make a substantial difference to the grassroots innovation movement in the country.

SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions), a developmental voluntary organization set up in 1993 gave rise to GIAN (Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network), a regional incubator for converting innovations into enterprise in 1997 and National Innovation Foundation (NIF) in 2000 to scale up the innovation system in the informal sector. SRISTI also has set up a Natural product lab through a small but significant support from Sadhbhav Foundation, a private trust, to add value to peoples knowledge, take these products to market through SRISTI innovations (a not for profit company) and pursue innovations in cultural, educational and institutional fields.

Many of these products are being manufactured and distributed through an ethical supply chain such that in sourcing as well as in distribution, local communities were involved and benefits are shared with the people. In the case where technologies have been licensed to the commercial companies following a benefit sharing model developed by SRISTI for the purpose.

The names of the communities and in a few cases even the photograph of the innovator has been put on the package of agricultural growth promoter. The model of celebrity endorsements is being challenged by getting the endorsements by the ordinary innovators. The idea is that if one farmer’s innovation can help thousand others, could not the users also innovate and participate in the innovation supply chain. Every packet therefore also has an appeal to the users to write back to NIF if they had any innovation to share.

SRISTI service centers have been set up in different villages by farmer members of the Honey Bee Network to try, demonstrate and sell herbal growth promoters to other farmers. The margin given to the wholesalers is distributed among the farmers who can use it to discount and demonstrate the technology to different users. To prevent people who cannot afford to buy products remaining out of the coverage, solutions are also open sourced through booklets, website and training ( see innovation and traditional knowledge base at www.sristi.org)[6]. Those who want to make their own product are encouraged to do so. We have to promote many more models which combine IP and open source in creative manner. Recently in a workshop of innovators who had developed various modifications around a core technology. It was resolved to develop a concept of technology commons so that people to people copying was encouraged and allowed but people to firm have to be through a license( see Sinha, 2008[7]).

Many more models of this kind remain to be developed. I foresee many changes in the coming years in the way markets may be organized.

(A)          Modular design[8]: More and more products will be developed in modular mode giving users the option to combine these in the manner they wanted and that too by sourcing different modules from different suppliers[9].

(B)          Collaborative Product and Service design is likely to become a dominant way of matching the needs of the people with the distributed supply chain[10].

(C)         Low scale markets will be served to large scale distributed networks: Today scale has become the enemy of the sustainability. The needs or demand which is small scale does not get the attention of the leading manufacturers because of the high cost supply chain that they have developed. Niche products can serve niche markets but they can also serve large modular markets by providing intermediates.

(D)         Differentiation through development and inclusion rather than exclusion: Today large number of companies serve exclusive client groups and celebrate the exclusivity. In some cases this may be understandable. But the exclusivity in treatment should not arise only through one ‘s economic status but also through social and cultural contributions. A teacher who has distinguished in a primary school or secondary school is no less important than a client who has sold fifty thousand cell phones in a week or a month. Inability of markets to differentiate on the basis of social, ecological, educational or cultural contributions devalues these and only support them through CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) or through charity,  is an obsolete model.

(E)          Simplicity in design will rule the minds more and more, it should be possible in a year or two for an old person in India to go a street corner shop and get a cell phone assembled having only three buttons for three children. If he does not want to call anybody else, he does not need more buttons nor a screen. The energy cost will go down so will the cost of cell phone. Somebody else may want a six inch screen to use it for educational purpose and not use it for voice call. Whole range of applications would emerge if the modular manufacturing becomes the rule.

(F)          The grassroots innovations will be taught in every school as a way of becoming an inclusive social person. Developing ideas and solving problems individually and collectively would be part of educational upbringing of every child. They would learn to combine 7 Es, ethics, excellence, equity, efficiency, empathy and environment with education though in different proportions in different activities.

Innovations as heuristic/template for social applications :

Many times the specific innovations may be less important than the principle behind them. Kanak Das from Assam, North East India noticed that the condition of the road in his village was quite bad. Cycle used to jump a lot when he drove over it. He felt that he could not improve the conditions of the road. But he asked himself, could not he make the bumps on the roadwork for him by generating energy?. This is perhaps the first cycle to generate energy from the bump. This concept can be used in practically all automobiles. Till recently when a few students in MIT, who had seen the video of Kanak Das cycle made a shock absorber based energy generation system, such a device had never been developed in the formal sector[11]. It is a pity that MIT  students  did not acknowledge formally the intellectual debt to the innovator though the student acknowledged the inspiration from the video. The concept of suspension in automobiles becoming a source of energy thus  is a new heuristic for energy generation or co generation.

Late Mr Savalia developed a cooking pan with ribbed bottom. All the utensils that we use in our homes have flat bottom. Indian Institute of Petroleum, a leading energy institute of the country tested it and found that because of the increased surface area, the thermal efficiency went up by more than one per cent. If heat tubes in chemical plants can have ribbed outer surface, the heat transfer efficiency would go up. A grassroots innovation could influence the productivity in large corporations.

Groundnut or peanut crop is grown in rainfed semi arid regions with light soils. Yusuf, an innovator in Rajasthan, a desert region developed a groundnut pod collecting machine attached to the tractor. It would help in scraping the soil with the pods and sieve it in a stirring tray to let the soil fall on the ground and pod remain on the sieve. It was a very useful machine for collecting the groundnut. A small scale entrepreneur in Visakhapatnam saw this innovation and licensed the technology for developing a sea beach cleaner. This was a very interesting application in a coastal region taking the cue from a technology developed in dry regions.

Let me illustrate few more examples of how ideas from one domain may influence technological development in another domain. A farmer used three different plants to develop a herbal pesticide. One of these was neem which is well known for retarding or stopping the growth of insects thus helping in plant protection. When Dr.  Dhananjay Tiwari, the scientist concerned took it up for validation under a joint NIF-CSIR cooperation, he noticed a phenomena which was not reported hitherto. When he exposed neem only to  UV rays  from two minutes to twenty minutes, the effectiveness of azadirachtin in neem declined steeply. That is longer the exposure, higher the degradation. When one of the remaining plants was added to neem, the degradation stopped. Thus was born the first herbal stabilizer. There are many reports of chemical means of stabilizing the reactive potential. If this stabilizer proves to be a generic one, a very unique contribution would have been made by a grassroots innovator towards the advancement of technology.

A tribal person[12] in Orissa had used leaves of a particular plant for ripening bananas. All the fruit ripeners world over are essentially chemicals known as ethylene inducers. When Central Food and Technology Research Institute, Mysore, a leading CSIR lab tested this claim, they found something very interesting. Not only the herbal fruit ripeners worked as it claimed but also did something more. It changed the ratio of reducing sugar to non reducing sugar in favour of the former. The result was that fruit became healthier. Such a technology was not reported before in the science[13].

Mehtar Hussain and Mushtaq Ahmed, two brothers in Assam, developed a hundred dollar windmill to pump water through hand pump. Purpose was to irrigate a small field. This was adapted by GIAN (Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network)[14], with the help of National Innovation Foundation (NIF) for use by salt workers to pump brine water. It was modified and made more sturdy for the desert environment. It now costs about 7 to 800 dollars and has a unique feature i.e., it can be bent 90 degrees to let a heavy storm pass over. Once winds are normal the windmill can be lifted again. Recently an enquiry was received from one of the first nations in Artic Circle in Northern Canada. They wanted to use it for generating energy. Such innovations would not emerge in an environment of material abundance.

The frugal innovations inspired by Gandhian Engineering, as Dr. Mashelkar calls it, will emerge in an environment where knowledge has to be maximized and materials have to be economized.

SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions) has developed many herbal technologies, as mentioned earlier to meet the needs of sustainable resource management. Most of the innovations developed at grassroots are green in nature. There is no scale from building upon these innovations while exploring sustainable options in future.

Parth Three: Lessons for Modern organizations and supply chain managers:

Reorganizing consumption and production relationships: When technologies are developed by producers who are also the users, they reflect the concerns of production and consumption environment much better. The quality control and frugality in design are inevitable consequences.

Embedding minimal energy in packaging:

A firm does not bother, as said earlier,  even if say 60 percent of its production is consumed within three months and within say 300 or 500 miles. Products are often packaged, as if this will be consumed after one year and beyond 1000 or 5000 miles. So much of packaging energy is over invested. A negligible number of consumers would prefer to refill their bottles at a super market say with coffee or tea of their choice rather than buying a fresh pack. Biological packaging has not picked up much although there are many useful crockery items that are made by using dried areca or other food safe leaves.

Paying for diversity in taste and appearances:

One would seldom find more than one kind of tomatoes, gourd or other such vegetables or fruits in super markets. For supply chain managers the uniform products are easier to pack, transport and distribute. Should this world be reorganized and denuded of biodiversity because that would make the life of supply chain managers easier. Or we should invent new ways of sourcing, storing, transporting and distributing bio-diverse products. The cultural diversity and biodiversity are closely linked and conserving one without another may not be easily possible.

Heuristics for frugal design and development processes:

A whole range of new platforms will have to be developed to design diverse products for distributed and diversified needs of the people in an affordable manner. Mass production based supply chains of uniform designs are passé. The collaborative product design will take place in an environment where the 7Es are synergized through an open sharing platform.  Apart from the grassroots innovators, one will have to mobilize the students as attempted through www.techpedia.sristi.org for building upon the ideas of the common people.

Solving the unsolved problems:

One of the greatest tragedies of modern time is an extraordinary high tolerance of the unsolved problems at the community level. If millions of women carry water on their head in deserts or undulated tracts, than a large part of the world lives patiently with it. If all the tea that one drinks in the morning is based on the leaves plucked by women manually creating pain and fatigue, than this pain does not get felt while sipping the tea. Unless there are time bound targets for the problems in search of solution (see techpedia.sristi.org) and dedicated funds, majority of these problems will remain unaddressed[15].

Creating global markets of grassroots products (g2G)[16]

NIF has not only sold products in all the six continents based on grassroots innovations but has also received queries from all over the world. Unless grassroots innovation and traditional knowledge based products get attention in global markets, the new economic and social order will not come about. Large-scale changes will have to be attempted in the innovation eco system. The global silence on the issue of multi media multi language( MMML)  knowledge and innovation databases will have to be broken. Likewise the worldwide emphasis, and perhaps for good reasons on micro finance will have to tampered with the concept of micro venture finance (MVF). The absence of MVF in the lexicon of social development implies an obvious neglect of the innovative potential at grassroots. If venture capital is so very valuable for bringing about transformation in the high-tech sector, will innovations at grassroots evolve further without similar support. The absence of support for MMML collaborative product design platform for grassroots applications also indicates similar systematic bias against inclusive development. When it comes to generating or providing services for the poor, we seldom think of their intellectual contribution.

Redesigning supply chains:

The ethical as well as efficiency criterion will demand that we redesign the supply chains by linking distributed, decentralized and diversified sourcing and distribution systems. We will have to redesign the production and consumptions relationships in a manner that the difference between producer and consumer goes down. More and more people ought to participate in contributing their labour, skills, other resources to develop low cost procurement and distribution system. For instance, large number of fabrication labs[17] and network of tool rooms should lead to user design products and services. The vertical supply chains will get transformed into horizontal supply chains. People will modify their lifestyle to buy more things from their neighbourhood villages and communities rather than only distant sources. There will be a scope for enhanced international trade in value added products instead of primary commodities. More and more value addition would take place in situ so that benefits of the value addition accrue to the producers and workers.

There is a need to rethink the whole development paradigm so that the decision making options not only of rich but also poor get widened and the time frame for them likewise gets elongated[18]. If some people have to think of survival next day while others are planning for next century, the societies will not be stable. Convergence in the time horizons has to be achieved by identifying opportunities for valorizing skills, knowledge and resources in which poor people are rich.

Some parts of my paper might appear utopian to others. Just as the cynical belief of many about continuing current disparity and exclusion appears utopian to me.