GRASSROOTS INNOVATION
Minds on the Margin are not Marginal Minds
Anil K Gupta
Penguin India
381 pages; Rs 599
This is a book about looking for, listening to and learning from rural innovators, but most importantly, returning to them the diffusible value so created. The author is well-known for his pioneering work in mobilising a wide-spread empathetic search for innovation in the informal sector, via the Honey Bee Network. After many years of stubborn effort, best represented by the padayatras he organised into rural areas, the Network received national and international recognition, and spawned many organisations including a rural venture fund, a technology acquisition and licensing arm, a website for documenting innovations, institutional patronage by the President of India, and, indirectly, the National Innovation Foundation itself. The book chronicles the long and uncommon saga of the search for innovators in the villages of India, the struggles and successes in linking them with formal institutions and scaling them, and the continued challenges of formalising rural innovations and linking them with entrepreneurs, finance and markets.
Though written by an academic, the book is not academic in its style or contents. The author's feelings of guilt, gratitude, suffering, happiness, obligation, and so on are not usually central in an academic thesis. However, for Anil Gupta, feelings are central, because they lie at the pivot between knowledge and action, and tilt the scale from inertia to change. Being a follower of the Gandhian maxim of transformation at the individual level, he believes that empathetic citizens can make an innovating, ethical society.
The narrative is for the most part absorbing, being a re-telling of various encounters with grassroots innovators woven around specific themes: The main one being that there is a wealth of traditional knowledge and innovation in the villages, but to find them, one has to go and seek them out, rid oneself of many pre-conceived notions about the economically poor, and acquire the qualities of humility, gratitude and empathy.
Mr Gupta's humanism does imply pacifism. He takes a belligerent stand against the promotion of jugaad as frugal innovation, pointing out that it is but a survival mechanism in an ecosystem of inefficiency and poor quality. He attacks the Rs 1 soap or shampoo sachet model of integrating the poor into markets, arguing that the model is sustained only by externalised environmental costs. He confronts Maslow's "needs hierarchy model" with evidence from the villages, where livelihood concerns do not stand in the way of high personal attainment via folk art, music and craft. Likewise, he hits out at government unwillingness to support simple, sustainable solutions, for example, in pest-control, and corporate unwillingness to adopt local ideas, for example, compressed-air engines. He laments the bias of institutions in favour of formal knowledge systems at the cost of the informal, and castigates the design of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act as a "systematic de-skilling of 250 million people".
However, Mr Gupta is no cynic. He describes various measures taken to document and make available online over 100,000 innovations, and success stories in proliferating some of those innovations, within India and beyond. He celebrates the success of Gujarat Technology University and others, in adopting the technical challenges of small entrepreneurs as college projects. He lauds the individuals who chose to act despite uncertainty and "imperfect beginnings".
In sum, this book chronicles a journey to mainstream innovations from the informal sector. It creates a different tune, in that it emphasises the role of emotion and intention in eliciting stories of grassroots innovation, and ethically sharing the value so created. The stories documented are inspiring, but the journey dominates the narrative.
Scholars, researchers and other seekers of structured knowledge may find the informal style somewhat limiting. There are significant editing lapses, including the repetition of lines and sections of paragraphs. The graphics are few, incomplete and unhelpful. The last roughly one-sixth of the book, which contains important content relating to next steps, namely systematic scale-up and linkage to contemporary market mechanisms, is written in lengthy and relatively dry passages.
Throughout the book, there seems to be no attempt to present the content in the form of a well-defined framework, even though many individual concepts and important conclusions and recommendations are presented. These idiosyncrasies may inhibit the work from taking the high academic platform it otherwise deserves.
Nonetheless, no policymaker, academic, entrepreneur, innovator, student or change-maker who seeks to engage with the vast innovative capacity at the lower economic rungs of society, in India or abroad, can afford to ignore this work. The observations presented can be expected to still resonate in the years to come.
Minds on the Margin are not Marginal Minds
Anil K Gupta
Penguin India
381 pages; Rs 599
This is a book about looking for, listening to and learning from rural innovators, but most importantly, returning to them the diffusible value so created. The author is well-known for his pioneering work in mobilising a wide-spread empathetic search for innovation in the informal sector, via the Honey Bee Network. After many years of stubborn effort, best represented by the padayatras he organised into rural areas, the Network received national and international recognition, and spawned many organisations including a rural venture fund, a technology acquisition and licensing arm, a website for documenting innovations, institutional patronage by the President of India, and, indirectly, the National Innovation Foundation itself. The book chronicles the long and uncommon saga of the search for innovators in the villages of India, the struggles and successes in linking them with formal institutions and scaling them, and the continued challenges of formalising rural innovations and linking them with entrepreneurs, finance and markets.
Though written by an academic, the book is not academic in its style or contents. The author's feelings of guilt, gratitude, suffering, happiness, obligation, and so on are not usually central in an academic thesis. However, for Anil Gupta, feelings are central, because they lie at the pivot between knowledge and action, and tilt the scale from inertia to change. Being a follower of the Gandhian maxim of transformation at the individual level, he believes that empathetic citizens can make an innovating, ethical society.
The narrative is for the most part absorbing, being a re-telling of various encounters with grassroots innovators woven around specific themes: The main one being that there is a wealth of traditional knowledge and innovation in the villages, but to find them, one has to go and seek them out, rid oneself of many pre-conceived notions about the economically poor, and acquire the qualities of humility, gratitude and empathy.
Mr Gupta's humanism does imply pacifism. He takes a belligerent stand against the promotion of jugaad as frugal innovation, pointing out that it is but a survival mechanism in an ecosystem of inefficiency and poor quality. He attacks the Rs 1 soap or shampoo sachet model of integrating the poor into markets, arguing that the model is sustained only by externalised environmental costs. He confronts Maslow's "needs hierarchy model" with evidence from the villages, where livelihood concerns do not stand in the way of high personal attainment via folk art, music and craft. Likewise, he hits out at government unwillingness to support simple, sustainable solutions, for example, in pest-control, and corporate unwillingness to adopt local ideas, for example, compressed-air engines. He laments the bias of institutions in favour of formal knowledge systems at the cost of the informal, and castigates the design of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act as a "systematic de-skilling of 250 million people".
However, Mr Gupta is no cynic. He describes various measures taken to document and make available online over 100,000 innovations, and success stories in proliferating some of those innovations, within India and beyond. He celebrates the success of Gujarat Technology University and others, in adopting the technical challenges of small entrepreneurs as college projects. He lauds the individuals who chose to act despite uncertainty and "imperfect beginnings".
In sum, this book chronicles a journey to mainstream innovations from the informal sector. It creates a different tune, in that it emphasises the role of emotion and intention in eliciting stories of grassroots innovation, and ethically sharing the value so created. The stories documented are inspiring, but the journey dominates the narrative.
Scholars, researchers and other seekers of structured knowledge may find the informal style somewhat limiting. There are significant editing lapses, including the repetition of lines and sections of paragraphs. The graphics are few, incomplete and unhelpful. The last roughly one-sixth of the book, which contains important content relating to next steps, namely systematic scale-up and linkage to contemporary market mechanisms, is written in lengthy and relatively dry passages.
Throughout the book, there seems to be no attempt to present the content in the form of a well-defined framework, even though many individual concepts and important conclusions and recommendations are presented. These idiosyncrasies may inhibit the work from taking the high academic platform it otherwise deserves.
Nonetheless, no policymaker, academic, entrepreneur, innovator, student or change-maker who seeks to engage with the vast innovative capacity at the lower economic rungs of society, in India or abroad, can afford to ignore this work. The observations presented can be expected to still resonate in the years to come.