THE land around me is thirsting for water. I am surrounded by dry brown fields, thorny scrub and dense bushes of cacti. The fields have just been harvested of cotton, the only crop that grows in this drought-prone area.
Gujarat is not the place to criticise large dams. People here are hoping that the huge and controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river will bring water to the state in about a year. They are convinced it will change their lives.
However, it will make little difference to women in remote hamlets, who will still have to rely on wells for their precious water. This is why Amrutbhai Agrawat, a stocky 55-year-old grandfather from Pekhor village in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, is their hero. He has solved a 2000-year-old problem that no one else seemed to care about.
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In rural India, collecting water is exclusively a woman鈥檚 job. For centuries all women鈥攖he very young, the pregnant, the old鈥攈ave been drawing water from wells using a rope and bucket, the only tools available. In dry areas with low water tables where the wells are deep this can be exhausting work. It is easy to lose your grip on the rope.
To make their work easier, Agrawat has developed a hand-operated pulley fitted with a lever that stops the rope from slipping. It allows the women to rest their arms without losing the bucket. A women鈥檚 organisation is now installing these pulleys across the state.
When I meet Agrawat he is sitting on his sofa-swing in his home-cum-workshop in Pekhor. I ask him where he got his innovating spirit. 鈥淚 lost my father when I was seven. My mother, who worked as an agricultural labourer, could not afford to send me to school. I started doing odd jobs鈥攊rrigating, sowing seeds, looking after bullocks, working with ploughs and pumps. There was no field job that I did not do. And that鈥檚 why I know a farmer鈥檚 problems.鈥�
With a loan of a little over $100, he set up a welding plant, bought a drill and a grinder and started making farm implements. He shows me his other inventions, which include a groundnut digger, a seed-sowing box and a four-wheeled tilting bullock cart that ploughs, sows and manures and reduces the weight on the bullock. He has passed on his passion to his son Bharat, who is in the courtyard working on a prototype wind-driven irrigation pump.
Rural India has thousands of Amrutbhai Agrawats, who without any formal education are quietly experimenting on their own and devising solutions to local problems. Their products may not make it into peer-reviewed journals, but they are proving a boon to the rural poor.
These inventors have a champion in Anil Gupta, professor at the Centre for Management in Agriculture at the Indian Institute of Management in Gujarat鈥檚 capital, Ahmadabad. Gupta is the antithesis of the archetypal management guru. He is bespectacled and bearded and wears homespun khadi, the Indian handloom cloth popularised by Gujarat鈥檚 most famous son, Mahatma Gandhi. Instead of advising multinational companies on their strategies, he travels around Indian villages searching for local entrepreneurs. Gupta believes many poor people have no choice but to be inventive if they want to survive, and that the higher the physical, technological and economic stress, the greater the probability that they will generate their own solutions.
But local innovations often remain isolated and unconnected. Gupta realised that the way forward was to share knowledge among communities with similar problems, and convert them into viable enterprises through investment and institutional support.
In 1989 he founded the Honey Bee Network in Gujarat. 鈥淭he honeybee does two things we intellectuals seldom do,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t collects pollen from flowers which do not complain, and connects flowers through pollination. We hope that if creative and innovative people in different cultures communicate and cross-fertilise their respective repertoire of ideas, the low self-image of the poor will change and new sustainable technologies and institutions will emerge.鈥�
Honey Bee is an informal network of farmers, artisans, academics and scientists. Its members mobilise grassroots organisations and schools across India, travel to distant villages on foot and hold competitions to scout for innovators and document their work. Assisted by the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions, Honey Bee now has more than 10,000 innovations and ideas on its books.
The network shares this knowledge with communities in India and 75 other countries through a newsletter published in 12 languages, including several Indian languages. It is having an international impact. A cure for selenium deficiency in horses in Mongolia was documented for Honey Bee by a Scottish scientist and is now being used by a tribe in Canada that faced a similar problem.
To scale up some of these innovations into commercial ventures, Gupta helped found the Gujarat Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network (GIAN) in 1997. The network gets academic institutions to test products, develop business plans and file patents. And thanks largely to Gupta鈥檚 efforts, the Indian government has pledged $4.2 million for a National Innovations Foundation to help make India a global leader in sustainable technologies.
Gupta stresses the importance of science and technology in development. 鈥淚f little science and big science, informal science and formal science join hands, we can lift people out of poverty,鈥� he tells me. The problem, he says, is that 鈥渙ur premier institutes are out of touch with reality and we are increasingly losing our ability to think simply鈥�. Innovators like Agrawat feel far removed from formal science and scientists, and some are highly dismissive of it. 鈥淲hat is the use of your fancy science? I鈥檒l believe in it the day they find a solution for mosquitoes and malaria,鈥� snorts Thakarshibhai Sawaliya, a wizened 75-year-old groundnut breeder who for years has been cross-breeding strains of groundnut with Mendelian zeal.
I leave the dry earth of Saurashtra and head north-west towards the barren, saline stretches of Kutch on India鈥檚 west coast. The salt and aridity make this land hostile to any kind of farming. Parts of it look hostile to any kind of living: last year this area was hit by a devastating earthquake. Nothing prepares me for the scenes of devastation.
In the middle of this, in the village of Kharaghogha, lives 30-year-old Dhanjibhai Kerai. Severely paralysed by polio, he is barely two-and-a-half feet tall. He has adapted a second-hand scooter for himself, turning it into a motorised wheelchair by adding two additional rear wheels and a small trolley to the front, in which he sits and hand-operates the gears, accelerator and brake. The only help he needs is someone to kick-start it.
Kerai has never been to school, yet he designs low-cost radios, black-and-white televisions and cassette recorders for fellow villagers. The roots of his electronic enterprise lie in a small radio an aunt gave him and which he dismantled to find out what it contained and how each part worked.
From such environments does true innovation spring. A Honey Bee publicity poster reads: 鈥淕ive me a place to stand and I will move the world.鈥� Gupta dreams of a 鈥済lobal innovations fund for all the world鈥檚 poor鈥�. You can imagine what that would do for development.
