Frugal and friendly innovations for extreme affordability

About 25 years ago, I was attending a workshop with carpenters and blacksmiths in rural Karnataka, south India to discuss ways in which local innovators could solve their problems. 

The wood used in the plough shear has to be very strong, dense and durable because of the obvious friction it has to bear while ploughing the land. Traditionally, farmers had used slow growing species like acacia sps, which had dense wood for the purpose. Over a period of time, the front edge of the shear got blunted.

Farmers never throw away the rest of the shear. And, thus began the material science research. The farmer went to the junkyard and started looking for different kinds of scrap of which he could make a shoe to be fitted on the shear. The metallic shoe will increase the life of the plough manifold. The rear portion of the shear has many years left. Finally, the metal used for suspension in the automobile was found to have the right combination of strength, weight, torque and durability. The point is that intuitively the local artisans and farmers have been doing some kind of material science research but, their choices are limited, their repertoire restricted and therefore the outcomes may be sub-optimal.   

There are thousands of such examples in the Honey Bee Network database mobilised over last two decades from around 545 districts. China has taken up the cause of grassroots innovations in a vigorous manner in the last six years. Malaysian Science & Technology Minister visited NIF, SRISTI and IIMA to build a lasting partnership for the purpose. A Global Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN) was proposed along with the Tianjin Declaration for creating online, multimedia, multi-language platform for collaborative design and development - a dream yet to be fully realised.

The lessons from frugal fabrication and people-driven innovations:
a. The trade off between affordability and accuracy may make a significant difference to the issue of accessibility and effectiveness. More accurate solutions need not always be more effective.

b. Many of the innovators use very old materials and design products using old tools.  The library of materials and publication possibilities has not been ever provided to grassroots innovators. If Virendkumar Sinha, a mechanic from Bihar can develop a pollution control device for capturing about a kilogram of carbon a month from the exhaust of 12 HP diesel engine and at the same time reducing the sound by half, it was not too much a tribute to the material as to the design. If his repertoire of material was richer, he could have developed even more efficient solution.

c. The human-powered fabrication tools are the need of the hour given the uncertainties of power supplies and inability to afford a diesel engine. We have several pedal-powered wood-cutting, drilling and shaping machines which can be improvised even further. A library of functional tools which can help transmit energy from one form to another will be very useful.

Large number of hydro turbine, biomass gasifier, terrain-induced energy powered bicycles, etc., need such solutions. NIF has more than a half a dozen compressed air vehicles and engines where the innovators don't have access to carbon fibre tanks or other such technologies for generating more efficiency than what normal tanks make it possible. The central issue is to create a kind of periodic table of materials for different functional and fabrication needs. People at the grassroots level may find such a matrix extremely helpful in narrowing down their search. There is little that modern science and technology has done for knowledge rich, economically poor people. But it can do a lot more.

d. One of the possible gains that NSF/ASME can draw from the partnership with creative people at grassroots level is access to new heuristics for frugal thinking, flexible fabrication and multi-functional designs. Nature is frugal, resilient, diverse and multi-functional.

Getting close to people who are close to nature and depending on them for meeting major needs may imbue in us a sensitivity, a perception, a compulsion to know, feel and do what we must.
 Honey Bee Network, SRISTI, GIAN and NIF are keen to forge partnership with all who are willing to share their expertise with innovators in informal sector and contribute towards empathetic and Gandhian engineering  solutions.

The author is a professor at IIM-A