Mind on the margins are not marginal minds:
Betting on green grassroots innovations or learning from Honey Bee network
Ideas for talk:
Why is that there so little content on web on green grassroots innovations all around the world except what honey bee network has done so far?
Is it because finding unaided innovations by common people are difficult to find?
Or because, people don’t wish to go village to village in search of such innovators or tradition knowledge holders? Have we lost faith in human ingenuity at grassroots level, after all don’t people search for only consumers of externally generated products and services at so called bottom of economic pyramid? What about these people as providers of knowledge, ideas, innovations?
I will talk about some examples of outstanding innovations such as : asu machine by mallesham, AP, for winding yarn by machine invented for the purpose what was done manually for centuries; typhoid herbal medicine, fruit ripener from orissa which ripens faster but also makes fruits healthier; tree climbers from kerala and Kashmir, water management system from manipur, bamboo splitting machines from mizoram, ( I might change some of these examples), children innovations-using unique personal gait as password for cell phone, monitoring device for pressure cooker whistle
Key policy/institutional issues:
a) with budget remaining constant for last years, in real term decline, and database expanding from ten thousand to 120 thousand bits of knowledge, innovations, ideas etc., there is an opportunity for social and market driven angel and venture funds to look at this database as a source of inclusive innovations
b) cultural and educational innovation along with social innovations at grassroots do need similar support to transform our relations with each other, nature and perfect strangers
c) how to scale up the effort to create a common ground for the projects of all young technologists/engineers to link informal sector and msme challenges with young students, see techepda.sristi.org or techpedia.in, having more than 38k projects by 3-4 students each)
d) how to create multi language multi media platform to encourage global cooperation in value addition in local innovations and fulfilling the potential of grassroots to global ( G2G) framework
e) despite more than eighty percent of 100k plus ideas, innovations and practice are harbal, the rate of value addition is very slow, how to scale it up and develop high throughput screening lab for finding time bound lab for generating affordable and accessible effective solution to the problems of developing tropical world ( in some cases, these will solve the problems of developed countries as well),
f) Can India become a crucible for creative solutions for global problems by replicating Honey Bee network experience worldwide
Anil K Gupta
