A first-of-its-kind international conference on creativity and innovation at the grassroots gets going at the Indian Institute of Management here today.
Another unique feature of the conference is that it will be inaugurated, not by one of the 300 experts and scholars from India and abroad who are attending it, but by an artisan of Pikhor village in the Junagarh district of Gujarat. The credentials of Amrutbhai Agrawat, the artisan, to do so is that he is a creator and innovator in the field of agriculture.
Over the past half a decade or so, he has not only developed a multi purpose, four-wheel bullock cart but also a sowing box and the groundnut excavator, the concept behind all of which are efficiency, economy and optimal productivity.
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There are many such alternative experts, as was discovered by the six-year-old Honeybee, an agricultural magazine published from the IIMA campus, which has collected a data bank on which much of the conferences proceedings will be based.
For instance P D Uplenchwar, who evolved an effective, economical and easy-to-make pesticide and, for lack of any modern publicity avenue, wrote its recipe on the wall of his house so that it could eventually be disseminated not only in his Vidarbha village but also in neighbouring regions.
The conference is organised by the Centre for Management in Agriculture of the IMMA, one of whose faculty members, De Anil Gupta, is the editor of Honeybee which also has a Gujarati edition and plans more in other Indian and foreign languages.
It is co-sponsored by Nabard, the FAO, ICAR, CSIR, the International Association for the Study of Common Property, the Oxford Centre of Ethics, Environment and Society, etc.
Apart from the plenary sessions everyday for the next five days, there will be thirty parallel sessions altogether, some of which overlap.
The latter especially are intended to facilitate an interface between professionals like I G Patel, Y K Alagh, Ilaben Bhatt, academics from most parts of the globe, officials including a former head of the Swiss patent office with representatives of the more amateur community on whose experiences this conference is largely based.
The occasion would also be utilised to take up the question of setting up a venture capital fund for small innovations.