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Saturday, August 26, 2006 |
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Rediff News has this article on the Honey Bee Network which is focussed on creativity and innovation at the grassroots level. "A bicycle that can peddle both on water and the road, a motorcycle used
to pump out water from deep wells and a cellphone that can switch on
electrical appliances within a specific radius! Self-taught
mechanics in India are pioneering these and many more. With such
inventions, self-taught mechanics or villagers with little or no formal
education to their credit are transforming the limited opportunities
available to them in remote and rural areas, say experts."Formal
and informal science can be linked to create new innovations and
transform the opportunities available in rural India," says Anil Gupta
of the Indian Institute of Management, who has taken upon himself to
collect and collate such traditional information scattered all over the
country under his Honey Bee network." You can search their innovation database for more grassroots innovations. Om Malik makes a point about how technology cannot be an end in itself, in response to the media blitz around Nicholas Negroponte's 100-dollar laptop and the news item that a small village in India got itself a website. "One gets fairly fed-up reading articles that tout such trivial things
like getting a Web site as this great signpost of development or that
(falsely) show technology as being the great equalizer and an end in
itself. And at the risk of being considered partisan ó towards the
Indian bureaucracy, Bill Gates and Intel all rolled into one ó I hold
even Nicholas Negroponteís ìOne Laptop per Childî (OLPC)
initiative guilty of overemphasizing technology as an end in itself.
What is a kid who goes to a school with rampant teacher absenteeism, no
infrastructure to speak of ñlike desks, fans or electricity to run
those fans ñgoing to do with a laptop?" And Atanu Dey has a requiem for the One Laptop Per Child project in India [link via Ethan] where he says:"Spending a few hundred million dollars will help some children, and also enrich the manufacturers of the laptops (Chinese manufacturing), and all the middle-layers that will be invovled in the selling, maintenance, and support. Compare that to the alternative use of the same money. Tens of millions of children donít go to school,
and of the many who do, they end up in schools that lack blackboards
and in some cases even chalk. Government schoolsóespecially in rural
areasóare plagued with teacher absenteeism. The schools lack even the
most rudimentary of facilities such as toilets (the lack of which is a
major barrier to girl children.) Attention and funds need to be directed to those issues first before one starts buying laptops by the millions." I think grassroots innovations are great when entry barriers to using them are low, and they tap real and relevant human needs that are culturally relevant and economically viable. Moreover, in the case of the Hansdehar website, its an experiment I'd love to follow, and see what transformations it makes in the lives of the villagers, whether it really gets picked up by other villages as a tool to better their lives, whether villages then will form communities and interact with each other in a manner that brings about social and economic change. Tags: rural india, india, innovation 9:01:02 AM  comment [] trackback []
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Copyright 2009 Dina Mehta
