Meet Arkhiben Mithabhai Vankar, a village healer and midwife. She is 65 years old and a widow. She lives in interior Gujarat. She earns around Rs 12,000 rupees a year. Now all of that is about to change. Arkhiben is set to earn over a lakh rupees annually. So what is the secret of her success.
Arkhiben is credited with the invention of herbal pesticide that keeps aphids, white flies and mealy bugs away. That was just the beginning of it. Arkhiben has now a patent filed and a business deal with Matrix Biosciences of Hyderabad.
So how is it that enterprising individuals from interior Gujarat are able to exploit their Intellectual Property to realize their dreams into commercial products ?
The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting story titled “India’s Rural Inventors help open Student’s eyes” by Chris Prystay. Writing on how a network of inventors from poorer areas is emerging into a global model, Chris profiles the Honeybee Network. The Honybee Network started by Prof Anil Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad, in 1988 to create an online database of rural innovations, a wikipedia of sorts of grassroots inventions.
The WSJ reports that Honeybee has catalogued more than 70,000 innovations by rural inventors in India. It has also helped several hundred of the innovators to meet third-party entrepreneurs to license their technologies as well as to file 142 patents.
The article profiles a few more examples of rural innovations emerging from Gujarat including a treatment for mastitis in dairy cows, made by a pool of 11 farmers in Gujarat which chalked up $3 million in revenues with profit sharing and branding with the inventor names. Another innovation from Gujarat is a natural pesticide that fights mites and prevents leaf-curl disease. The inventor is one Popatbhai Rupabhai Jambucha, an illiterate farmer from Gujarat.
As Gujarat heads to polls Chief Minister Narendra Modi is seeking to put development in Gujarat at the heart of the political debate. The Gujarat Congress much to the disappointment of the left wing radicals has also chosen to challenge Modi and his model of development rather than focus on the past. Nitin recently ripped apart Tehelka’s lame attempt at drawing misleading conclusions, Offstumped has a hindi summary of Nitin’s pieces here. Much has been said about Modi’s model of development for Gujarat as well as some questions have been raised on his contribution to what was already happening in Gujarat before he came into the picture.
In the context of the culture of innovation in Gujarat and initiatives like the Honeybee Network that have been fostering the spirit of enterprise to commercialize these innovations, Modi’s remarks at the WEF Dalian Summit are relevant. Speaking on “Perspectives on Entrepreneurship ? Why Culture Matters” Modi had this to say
?The new world business acumen has to be based on the three sound pillars of ancient culture ? vision, mission and goals,?
?A society that values these ethos and which promotes commerce with culture, trade with tradition and entrepreneurship with empathy is a society that will see its people succeed in any endeavour,? he added.
?bridging the gap between societies and cultures by sharing the fruits of success, as well as knowledge, labour and capital?. Acceptance of globalisation will succeed only when the concept of ?global family? is put into practice.
The global family Modi is referring to is much like the global network Honeybee is aspiring to build.
The question for Gujarat as it heads to polls is not whether Modi was directly responsible to its economic success.
The real question for Gujarat is who can catalyze the spirit of enterprise that already exists in Gujarat and open it up to global opportunities.
The real question for Arkhiben and Popatbhai is who is best placed to empower their fellow innovators to view the whole World as their market.
Will they make the next election about opportunity and empowerment or will they regress into seeking entitlements ?
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Propaganda for Modi, huh? Even he will be embarrassed by this post! Will Gujarathis stop innovating or will Prof. Anil Gupta abandon his work, if Congress comes to power?
Balaji – oh boy browsing on diwali. Read the bottomline again it is not about innovating it is about creating the catalyst for selling to the whole world. No endorsement of Modi. Both he and the congress need to spell out how they will make it happen. That is where the debate ought to be.
kindly keep honey bee network out of politicAL debates, we believe strongly in the secular approach to development and have helped and will help green grassroots innovators of all faith and persuasions.
We have received excellent help from previous and current central and state governments
I hope that we can discuss how the vast community of gujarati and other entrepreneurs help in mentoring these innovators, take grassroots dreams to global markets, ensure that knowledge rich and economically people do not remain at the bottom of economic pyramid( many of them already are at the top of innovation and ethical pyramid), create multi-media multi language exhibition of innovations, set up regional incubators in Dangs and banaskantha, panchmahals etc., to add value to local traditional and contemporary knwoledeg
please
thanks
anil
Dear Prof Anil Gupta
Thanks for visiting Offstumped. Pleased to read of your success and congratulations on all the great work.
You raise an interesting point that is worth debating. I don’t understand where faith or religious persuasion comes into play here. It is not a factor, funny you should bring it up.
From the essence of your comment I am concluding that you don’t see a role for the state to create an environment for commercializing these innovations and making global markets accessible to them.
Continuing my comment. I can appreciate that. But then you also mention support from previous governments. My question to you is are you seeing enough scale in tapping into all potential innovators and enough opportunity to access global markets. Is there nothing that your rural innovators as participants in a democracy would want from the state in terms of facilitation or liberalisation. Are there laws or restrictions that are limiting them in anyway. Don’t you see any room for issues of that nature
Further continuing my comment. I can appreciate your comment on keeping out your network out of the political debate. But the question is to your rural innovators who are also participants in a democracy. Are there areas where they would like more economic freedom. Any reason why those issues of economic freedom must not be a matter of political debate. If your contention is that there is enough economic freedom in gujarat and the best thing for the state to do is not get in the way, that’s great endofdebat
Prof. Gupta is crazy about bringing secularism and politics in a purely entreprenurial and economic matters regarding their Honey bee activities.Why smell the rat here? It is a matter of coincidence that some of the Honey bee activities have happened in Gujarat at present ruled by NM for the last 7 years. So why grudge this happening of fact? NM is quoted by Offstumped about what NM said at Dalian. And what forceful words and ideas are of NM! There should not be any grudge here to accept the truth behind NM’s vision, intiative and thrust for economic development.
well friends, “they” are not my innovators, they are creative citizen in their own right and have every right to express their democratic freedom, the way they wish.
why should it need my comment, or elaboration.
regarding THE SUPPORT FROM STATE, I CAN ONLY SAY THAT EVERY STATE CAN SUPPORT THE INNOVATION MOVEMENT, gian.ORG IS AN EXAMPLE OF THAT. WAY BACK IN 1997, WITH THE HELP OF GUJ GOVERNMENT along with sristi, iima and other stakeholders, INDIA’S FIRST INCUBATOR FOR GRASSROOTS GREEN INNOVATIONS wAS SET UP.
However, when it comes to commercialization globally, the role of state is less important and the private mentors, entrepreneurs, product developers, designers and other supporters can play a greater role.
State can indeed provide support for product development and diffusion of social innovations. State can help in organizing demonstration of open source innovations to facilitate their wider diffusion, and there are a lot of such technologies which can benefit from such a support.
The point i am making is that if each NRG in whose village women have to use pulley to draw water with lot of drudgery, decides to upgrade that pulley, then may be in 5-600 villages where drinking water problem exists, the pain of women can be reduced.
Likewise, if the NRIs or NRGs who care for the soil health or water quality or air quality back home wish to sponsor demonstration of herbal pesticides to substitute chemical pesticides/growth promoters, then quality of environment can be improved and cost fo cultivation of farmers can be reduced. Likewise, for animal care, herbal medicine can be used. Traditional Food Festival–Sattvik 2007 being organized at iima campus during dec 1-4 2007 can help generate demand for kodri, bunti, nagli etc,., minor millets which have eight times more fiber than many of the modern grains like wheat and rice. The gain of increase in demand will go to people in drier regions of gujarat where these grains are grown.
In all this, more than the role of state, the consumers, well wishers, philanthropists, market players, R and D agencies, angel investors etc., can p[lay a greater role
i hope i have answered your comments,
more information about what we do and why, can be obtained at sristi.org gian.org nifindia.org and sristi.org/anilg
with best wishes
anil
Prof. Gupta,
Thank You for the great work you do.
Yossarin,
From a practical standpoint we need to ask whether the state (ie the ‘government’) has been a help, a hindrance or neutral to a particular initiative. The next question would be how much of a help or a hindrance has it been?
Dr Anil Gupta’s comments suggest that it has been either of help, or neutral or not much of an hindrance. As he says, it’s good to keep it out of political debate, given the contemporary system’s propensity to press the political undo button.
As for building networks in the Diaspora—well, the more the merrier. Such networks will inevitably have several interconnecting nodes, which will add positive externalities to the networks they are a part of.