New pedagogies, processes and purposes:

Poor as providers of green innovative solutions

Anil K Gupta[1]

Absurd as it may seem to a few, my argument mainly rests on the ability of economically disadvantaged people to trigger frugal, creative and recombinable innovations that can stimulate creation of new  pedagogies, products, and  processes.   Therefore, the model that I talk about is ‘sink’ to ‘source’.  Such people are not ‘sink’ of our advice, or clients of CSR ( corporate social responsibility), but given a chance, they can be a provider of solutions  that may need further value addition in some cases. Why is that the designers of pedagogies  and curricula world over neglect the need for learning from knowledge rich-economically poor people. Why are there so few papers on innovations by workers in organised and unorganised sector compared to managerial innovations?  When even those countries which have suffered at the hands of colonial rulers show disdain towards knowledge from below, I feel sad and a bit alarmed at the purpose of this persistent neglect. Is it that if we acknowledge the potential of such common people to solve local problems through their own genius in some cases, our policies and programs will have to be redesigned in a fundamentally different manner. In India, then government will not be able to continue with its massive rural employment guarantee program neglecting the mental work, stressing only on menial work.  In Africa too, such neglect is rampant. Are not we the intellectuals and teachers mainly responsible for such biases in developmental thinking? After all we create the legitimacy for such thinking.

Inclusive development:

If we use the transaction costs framework, we can recognise at least two kinds of costs, ex-ante and ex-post. The ex-ante transaction costs include the cost of searching information, finding suppliers, negotiating a contract and drawing up contract. The ex-posttransaction costs include and monitoring and enforcement, in other words, compliance of the contract, side payments, costs of conflict resolution and if it does not work out, the cost of redrawing the contract.  In the context of inclusive innovation model,  we have to find out ways by which both these costs can be reduced so that barriers to entry and exit can go down and innovation partnerships can emerge between formal and informal sectors.   In the absence of local language database, search cost of affordable solutions goes up for small farmers and pastoralists. If there is no database of engineering projects done by students, then small scale entrepreneurs can not find the potential applications they could use. Without distributed knowledge management platforms like Techpedia.in , Originality can not be promoted, collaboration can not be forged. That’s why Honey Bee database came up twenty years ago. It has helped National Innovation Foundation pool 140,000 ideas, innovations and traditional knowledge examples from 545 districts of India in the last decade beginning with ten thousand such ideas. Honourable President of India honour the outstanding innovators every two years. In fact President Patil has invited HBN to have an exhibition of grassroots innovations at President’s Place during March 11-14,2010, the  first ever such invitation to creative common people by any head of the state.  And this is not all. The www.techpdia.in has been created thanks to the voluntary contribution by young students like Hiranmay during the last six months to pool 100,000 projects of 350,000 technology students from 500 engineering colleges in India.

Honey Bee Network provides not only a justification but also an operational framework for such a partnerships among young students, creative farmers, formal and informal sector to emerge.

Conditions for inclusion:

Inclusive or harmonious development is recognised as one of the most important goals of socio economic development in most of the developing countries in particular, India, China, Brazil and South Africa.  Inclusion can take place by treating economically poor and disadvantaged people as (a) consumer of public policy of assistance and aid for basic needs, or (b) consumer of products at low cost made by large corporations [à la Prahalad] or state or other enterprises.  Inclusion can also take place by building their capacity to produce what they already know and do; or enable them to convert their innovations and outstanding traditional knowledge either as such or by blending /bundling it with knowledge of others, into products marked by them or other enterprises. In addition, linkage with modern institutions of R&D to receive technologies or products developed by the institutions or to add value to their knowledge, innovation or practices for developing value added products for eventual diffusion through commercial or non-commercial channels can also help inclusion.

Honey Bee Network has mobilised thousands of grassroots green innovations and traditional knowledge examples from all over India and different parts of the world.   Some of them provide useful heuristics for innovations in totally unrelated sectors.  Let me illustrate.

Yusuf developed a groundnut digger in Rajasthan.  This farm machinery works on the principle of lifting the pods mixed with the soil, stirring a sieve or a wire mesh and collecting the pods and leaving the soil on the ground.   Another entrepreneur from down south read about it and thought of a creative application.  He wanted to use the groundnut digger for sea beach cleaning.  The problems were similar but creative leap of imagination took place when a potential user transformed the context of the solution from one sector to another.  Farther the domain of application from the domain of origin, higher the value one could get from an innovation.

Late Mr.Savalya, a very creative small scale entrepreneur tried to improve the thermal efficiency of a cooking plate made conventionally of iron by replacing it with an aluminium hot plate having grooves or ridges on the bottom side.  Studies at Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun and University Department of Chemical Technology, Mumbai demonstrated the gain of about 1.05 per cent in the thermal efficiency because of the ridges.   We are all aware about the heat tubes used in industrial boilers.  If only the surface of these tubes could be redesigned to have ridges all around, the thermal efficiency can go up and at least one per cent energy can be saved. Mansukh bhai Prajapati designed one dollar non stick pan of clay, making even the poorest people aspire to get safer, affordable, and frugal energy saving cooking plate. A traditional farmer in one part of Gujarat used a leaf and an insect, crushed together to repel the pest.  Chemistry of such materials combined together has not been reported.  Cell phones are used for communication around the world.  But, applications of these phones as switching device attached to any appliance or tube well in the farm, were developed by a school dropout, young boy, viz., Prem Singh.   No big company gave such a choice to the consumers.  One could switch on the microwave, geezer or any other such device while coming home from the office.  Lot of comfort can be added to life. Enlarging the scope of existing technologies to new applications can bring new customers for business and in a  few cases, even  meet the unmet needs of disadvantaged consumers.

 

There is a worldwide diffusion of Bt Cotton –a genetically modified cotton variety- to reduce pesticide consumption. While chemical pesticides are indeed very harmful and must be controlled, the Bt need not be the only alternative. Nature does not favour uniformity. Market and public extension agent will have no incentives to diffuse numerous non chemical ways of pest control and increasing production ( see http://www.sristi.org/hbnew/searchdatabase.php). Why should they tell farmers that by growing lady’s finger as a border crop, they can trap cotton pests. Or by spraying jaggery solution, they can attract black ants which can kill the larvae of harmful pests. The orphan green technological innovations will not diffuse on their own, they need public spirited teachers, extension agents and policy makers and user networks.

 

student

Summing up:

The time has come to go beyond the boundaries of the conventional organisations, disciplines, sectors and  pedagogies. We have to look for platforms that link creative but economically disadvantaged peopleto  learn from their sustainable solutions.   The ‘sink’ has to become ‘source’ and the poor have to become providers.

Anil K Gupta