VCs in India can’t be bothered with Santosh Ostwal’s low-tech product. But the world—including Barack Obama’s Chief Technology Officer—loves it. Read on to find out why.
In a world governed by robotics and embedded smart chips, Santosh Ostwal’s invention comes off as quaintly old fashioned, something that was perhaps slapped together at night by a bunch of intoxicated IIT engineers to aid in a midnight prank.
Ostwal’s Nano Ganesh, is essentially a circuit board that acts as an interface between a 440 volt water pump and a 3.8 volt cellphone. In addition to exchanging packets of information that also includes letting a caller know whether there is electricity present or not, it effectively switches the pump on or off, the trigger being the cell phone, and inevitably saves a huge amount of water.
Simple and perhaps ingenious yes, but sexy it is not since Nano Ganesh is obviously bereft of all the ingredients that would quicken the pulse of India’s venture capital community. Yet, Ostwal is, at this very moment, winging his way on an all-expenses paid 10-day trip to San Francisco for the prestigious Tech Awards in which he is a featured company. In 2009, his idea was powerful enough to win the grand prize at Nokia’s Innovator Awards held in Barcelona.
The reason Ostwal has wowed the world audience is because productisation for solutions to the problems, or miseries, of the world’s underprivileged rarely takes place. Yet, entrepreneurs driven by the need to solve local problems with local solutions have emerged where the government or even other private initiatives have failed. Harish Hande’s solar systems for the poor or Gyanesh Pandey’s husk-powered gasifiers for rural Bihar are two examples of engineers who immersed themselves in figuring out solutions to help their own communities and maybe make a buck or two while at it. Ostwal deserves to be in that category.
We take switching things on and off for granted. For a farmer whose fields are miles away and electricity a fickle beast, remote management becomes crucial. Ostwal got a first-hand taste of this, when at the age of fourteen he would spend three or four months a year on his grandfather’s farm, 50 kilometres outside Pune. Dadaji as he was known, was an avid horse rider—a passion that he harnessed in order to travel top his fields and back. One day, a wound that was a result of a horse riding injury became septic and then gangrenous. The doctors eventually had to amputate the old man’s leg above the knee.
This didn’t stop the indefatigable Dadaji from patrolling his orange fields daily, which he did with the aid of a roughly hewn stick. Orange crops require regular watering, especially when they are a few days from being plucked, in order to maintain adequate freshness and moisture. Ostwal says that Dadaji would leave in the middle of the night and hobble away to his fields, switch his pump on, come back home and repeat this performance every time the electricity went off, which would be as many as seven to eight times on any given night. “He would come back early morning, not having slept and had to then immediately begin other tasks around the farm,” says Ostwal. Naturally, Ostwal was scarred by watching this theatre of the absurd every night, but intrigued enough as an aspirational engineer to try and figure out a solution. “As I got interested in this, I began to discuss this with other farmers and discovered that they all shared the same problem.”
Ostwal got married in 1991 which was probably the best thing that ever happened to him since his wife, Rajashree, happened to be an electrical engineer herself. He describes her as “aggressively committed to our business” and basically the boss of the manufacturing wing of Nano Ganesh. The two became co-workers and accomplices in the dream to earn a living as entrepreneurs while cracking the problem of remote management of water pumps. Their products were three to four small parts such as timers and switches. “She would assemble them in our bedroom. I would act as the marketing manager,” says Ostwal.
In the mid-90s, the desire for a ‘remote control’ amongst farmers was huge, says Ostwal and his own work focused on wireless systems. Still, there were big obstacles. Farmers didn’t need the short range wireless systems that Ostwal was working with—but longer range frequencies required a license. This effectively put the nail in the coffin of a long range wireless solution since anyone expressing a desire to trigger anything from afar using a cell phone post 9/11 would have found it far easier to rob a bank than lobby for a wireless license.
A few years later, Ostwal was officially broke and faced the humiliating reality of not being able to support his wife and two children. So he did what many do when they’re in this situation—go home to mom and dad who lived in a 100 year-old two bedroom wadi in an old part of Pune. “I had to ask for pocket money from my father, at the age of 36,” he says.
One night, Ostwal had what he describes as a “beautiful dream of Lord Ganesha”—and whether pushed by some kind of desperate delirium because of his precarious financial situation, or divine interference from the heavens above, Santosh began to wander all around Pune looking for the idol that came to him in his sleep. It was a three month quest. “The image was calling me somewhere. I finally reached a very dirty shop selling raddi. And there it was, lying on the floor, the exact same Ganesha that was in my dream.” It also happened to be Ganesh Chaturti and suddenly the idea to use cell phones came to him like a bolt out of the blue sky. “Within the next twenty minutes, I figured out how it would work and Rajashree and I tested it out in the next two days. It worked.”
Whatever you may think of this story—surreal, deranged, completely plausible—the fact is that Ostwal has sold almost 12,000 units of Nano Ganesh, each costing anywhere from Rs 560 to Rs 2,500 depending on the bells and whistles required. Units are assembled from his small 16-member factory with Rajashree in charge of production. According to Ostwal’s calculations, vetted by the Tech Museum in California, Nano Ganesh has so far saved 180,000 cubic metres of water, 1080 MW of power, 18 tankers of petrol, 18 cubic metres of soil erosion and $720,000 in labour costs so far. His net margins for just this year are in the 15-20 per cent range, he says.
Inspiring stuff, but Ostwal’s challenges have only just begun. Firstly, his technology isn’t exactly state of the art. A quick chat with Sadanand Prabhakar, CEO of Hyderabad-based Sooxma technologies which works in robotics and the embedded space reveals that this kind of technology is hardly unique. “There’s really no tech involved,” says Prabhakar. “We mentor some students who have done things like this as summer projects. So I can’t say much about the technology, but I can say that he is a good businessman,” he adds.
In a world where hundreds of companies could have the same solution, the one who becomes king is someone who has a handle on distribution. Plus, for anyone flogging equipment to the hinterland—or even in urban India—servicing and maintenance becomes the backbone of the company, as solar solution provides Shell Solar found to its detriment, causing its ultimate demise. These were precisely what were hobbling Ostwal all these years.
Ostwal quickly figured out that in the absence of a reliable retail channel to farmers, the next best option was to place ads in electronics magazines for help. He got a tremendous response. He now has 1,000 what he calls “agro-electronics commandoes” across seven states who he says “will dedicate themselves to Nano Ganesh customers, despite all the odds or inhospitable terrain.” He is targeting a massive scale-up of 50,000 Nano Ganesh installations this year and 5,000 trained ‘commandos.’
Ostwal’s whole enterprise may seem quixotic and charming and ultimately a trifle compared to what India needs to move ahead. Yet, US President Barrack Obama’s Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra was so impressed with Nano Ganesh while being introduced to the firm during a FICCI conference on Science & Technology that he called it “among my favourite entrepreneurial success stories coming out of India” with a “very frugal approach to control farming/irrigation systems,” Says Nirankar Saxena, Director, FICCI: “I think he’s going to change things. Nano Ganesh is cheap, affordable, rugged, can work in all environments. It is the duty of the government to take this to the next step.” FICCI is acting as a catalyst for Ostwal’s company and hopes to network him in with Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative’s (IFFCO) program that houses 133,000 farmers—a potentially bonanza for Ostwal.
Call Nano Ganesh an example of jugaad, call it low-tech, call it what you will, but for rural India that doesn’t have the AMDs or Intels, or for that matter the Tatas or Mahindras devising urgently needed solutions for common place problems, the grit, chutzpah—and dreams—of the Santosh Ostwals of the world will have to do for now.
