Financing innovation

Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam once famously said, “Innovation opens up new vistas of knowledge and new dimensions to our imagination to make everyday life more meaningful and richer in depth and content”. How true.

 It is a well chronicled fact that India is a land of immense diversity. There is no faith that does not find a large presence here and the geography and climate changes every 50 kilometres or so.

To bring such a vast kaleidoscope under one umbrella and in doing so innovate and balance the pressures of urban living while clinging to tradition, is a challenge of herculean proportions.

 It is to achieve this delicate balance and rather arduous task that institutions like the ‘National Innovation Foundation’ (NIF) have taken it upon themselves to provide financial and technical assistance to innovators and by the looks of it, are doing a fine job.

 Take farmer Pandharinath Sarjerao More from Maharashtra’s Nagar district. He can be credited with inventing an ‘all in one machine’ to meet his farming needs.

 More used to produce guava, emblica, mosambi and drum sticks in his 33 acre land. After a few years, he added sugar cane, soybeans, wheat and onion to his list of crops. As any expert will vouchsafe, it is always a tough job to sow onions in the rabbi season as it is time-consuming and labour intensive. In addition, you need skill, always a scarce commodity.

 Finally, More decided to find a solution himself. After a month-and-a-half long fruitless struggle, he designed an ‘all in one machine’ by joining blades to the tractor. This machine is a tractor-drawn semi-automatic unit. It can perform three simultaneous functions, transplanting onion, applying fertilizer and making equally spaced irrigation channels.

In planting, it becomes difficult to maintain straight rows. That is also the main barrier to mechanical weeding. This innovative machine facilitates mechanical weeding covering one hectare per day. More was financed and supported by the (NIF).

 With this striking innovation, it became possible to sow onion, sprinkle fertilizers and to irrigate, all at one go. This machine has not just proved helpful to him but has emerged as a model for farmers around the country.

 NIF’s experiment with Andhra Pradesh’s Pochampalli sarees has been equally creative. To craft one such masterpiece, the designer needs to move their hand in a semi-circle up-ward and down-ward motion a whopping 9,000 times, taking about four hours to complete.

 But 37-year-old Mallesham changed all that. He knew the art of weaving sarees on handloom like the back of his hand. But he wanted to elevate and take this art inherited from his parents, to another level and why not? Mallesham’s mother would produce two sarees a day which meant she would move her hands 18,000 times a day!

This was a cause of horrible pain in her hands, a reason why she never wished her son and daughter in-law to take to the family business.

 What Mallesham lacked in technical knowledge, he made up with his immensely strong will power. In 1997 he decided to bring his ideas to life with the help of the money his wife had given him. But inappropriate knowledge and lack of adequate financial support were hurdles he needed to surmount.

 In 1999 Mallesam succeeded in designing a wooden cube. He got assistance from NIF’s ‘Honey-Bee’ network and the wooden cube was transformed into steel.

 From 2002 to 2004, he sold 100 pieces of his brandmark ‘Asu’ machine. In 2005, more changes followed and in due course, it became possible to weave a saree in one-and-a-half hours instead of the four.

 Mallesam aptly christened it after his mother’s name, calling it the “Laxmi Asu Machine’’. NIF has since then been in the forefront of appreciation giving him and his machine a state-level award.

 Mansukh Prajapati from Gujarat’s Kota district is another example. Born in a poor potter family, he somehow managed to study till Class 10 and became bread-winner of the family.

At a job in a tile workshop, Prajapati’s attention was drawn to how a pressing machine functioned. At home his family would make 100 clay pans a day but he reckoned if they used this machine, he could take the number to 700 pans a day. Prajapati took loans to buy the machine and thereafter followed a series of innovations. He started to design clay’s unbreakable pan along with a non-stick pan.

 That was followed by further alternations: a clay fridge came into being and is currently drawing global appreciation, apart from its price of Rs 1,500. This list of NIF beneficiaries is long and some innovations can be considered truly path breaking. Makarand Kale of Sangali in Maharashtra has innovated a bullet-proof jacket using material gleaned from trees.

A manufacturer of sports goods and a sports teacher, Kale using tree extracts, silk, cotton and 20 per cent decoction (ie the extraction of the water soluble substances of a drug or medicinal plants by boiling) invented a jacket that can stop a bullet!

With just the right mix of grinding and blending, it seems, even bullet-proof jackets, helmets and cars along with fire-proof devices are not beyond invention. Kale has received a fourth prize in NIF’s competition. To lend it scientific credence, this jacket has passed some acid tests, notably by Ahmedabad’s College of Engineering and the Central Institute of Plastic and Technology. NIF too is trying to get a patent fir it. It should be considered heartening to go to the NIF’s website where there are close to 10,000 listed innovators, truly pan-Indian in their sweep. Sample some of them:
*    Kerala’s Mathew K has invented a mosquito destroyer
*    Imali Toshi of Nagaland has created a bamboo pealing machine
*    A Murugantham of Koimtur has invented a machine manufacturing 1,000 sanitary napkins a day and a vending machine which provides those napkins         
*    Sarfuddin Kazi of Jalgaon has constructed a stove without pump.

In the good likeness of Raghunath Mashelkar and Anil Gupta, the NIF has supported  many such pioneers in the last ten years. The NIF — luckily for all potential innovators —  is perpetually on the look out for people who are willing to break away from the mold.

In this, their search takes them far and wide, from the small villages to crowded little by lanes. It also tries to get the manifestation a patent so that the innovator profits out of it and the public gets to utilise it fully.

Their record is quite impressive by standards in India. Till date, the NIF has applied for 350 patents out of which 33 products have got patent. Success has come in the patent heartland, the United States with four out of seven were accorded patents.

It is thanks to this that Ashok Zunzunwala’s wireless local loop technology could reach Brazil and Madagascar and Vinay Deshpande’s personal computer became a hot favourite in Malaysia and Brazil. According to the Global Innovation Index 2011, India ranks 62 while holding a ninth place in the list of Innovation Efficiency Index. This list has 125 countries in it. NIF and other like-minded institutions could take India further.