Indra’s Drishtikona (Viewpoint)

India Needs More of This Class

Posted : March 31, 2005 at 10:06 pm [IST]

I read about Evan I. Schwartz’s book, ‘Juice’- the creative fuel that drives world- and wrote about it in my entry on February 10, 2005. Schwartz writes in the epilogue about Ashok Khosla. It was a chance that I found the story. It was very captivating; more as it was in a book related to revolutionary inventions and process that goes in inventions based on the lives and works of some big inventors of the ages. I consider it as one of the best appreciation of one’s work that he can think of.

Though I live in India and almost in New Delhi. I consider myself voracious reader as well as well informed through net surfing, I never even heard about Ashok Khosla. I love to put whatever Schwatz has written about him in the epilogue almost without any editing. He may be a model and his work can set some benchmark for those who want to do something for the massive lowest section of the Indian society.

About one out of every six people in the world live on less than $2 per day, and billions of others live only marginally less impoverished lives. Can invention do for the developing world what it has done for the developed world?

……More and more inventive thinkers in the developing world are responding to the challenges around them. One of the most successful is an inventor named Ashok Khosla. Born in India, Khosla was educated at Cambridge University and received his PH.D from Harvard University, where he lectured on the topic of the environment. He enjoyed the American lifestyle and his apartment overlooking the Charles River. But after ten years at Harvard, he decided to return to India.

In the 1970s, Khosla helped the Indian government set up the first national agency for environmental protection in the developing world. Then in the mid-1980s, he struck out as an entrepreneur, starting a New Delhi company called Development Alternatives.

His goal was to create what he calls “sustainable livelihood” jobs that produce basic products and services for the local economy, generate income and purchasing power, and provide dignity and meaning to the people’s lives. As the old saying goes, “Give a person a fish, feed them for a day, Teach a person to fish, feed them for a life time.” But something is always left out of the equation: First, you need to invent a system for creating and distributing the appropriate fishing rods.

Khosla sees three proven models that can turn poor nations into rich ones: copycatting, piggybacking, and leapfrogging.

Copycats steal ideas, technologies, and techniques from other countries and improve and adapt them. During its first few decades, the United States ripped off the key secrets of the Industrial Revolution from England, Scotland, and France and launched its own industrial economy. Two centuries later, Japan and Korea developed by copying American manufacturing, raising the quality and lowering the cost of goods. Now China is doing it again. On contrast, India is practicing the art of piggybacking, riding on the backs of rich nations by doing an increasing share of their manufacturing and service work at far lower costs. Finally, leapfrogging involves skipping over inappropriate technologies and embracing new ones; an example is Finland’s sudden break from backward Soviet domination and its adoption of inventions such as wireless networks. Khosla believes that developing nations need to employ all three models at once

Khosla is focused on the rural poor. He’s focused on scaling the global process of invention outward to as many people as possible.

To do this, Khosla is marshalling the same thinking strategies as other world-class inventors. Creating an ambitious opportunity in his own mind, he envisions bringing 700 million people in India out of impoverishment or subsistence living. The problems he has pinpointed are quite specific.

People need places to live, but they can’t afford most construction materials. They need to produce their clothings locally. They need ways to cook food, but electricity service is spotty at best. They need way to purify water. They need cheap, renewable energy.

The most successful inventions in such environments are the ones that use locally available materials. Khosla has invented a series of new products: a hand-operated press that converts mud into hard bricks for low cost housing; a vertical kiln that rapidly and continually bakes and churns out high-quality bricks made from native clay; a machine for making cheap roofing tiles out of industrial waste; a process for turning local weeds into a fuel that can burn in a diesel engine that can provide power to an entire village; woodstoves that dramatically reduce smoke inhalation; and hand powered looms and paper making machines based on radically simple designs. Khosla has also embraced failure, creating many technologies that flopped, such as solar-powered water heaters that were too expensive for most people.

One of his biggest innovations is a franchising system. Borrowing a page from Ray Kroc of McDonald, Khosla has created a network of dozens of local dealerships that set up their own businesses distributing dozens of these technologies and training people how to use them. Just as important as the jobs created at the franchise level are the jobs created by inventions themselves. Each of the Khosla’s products creates an enterprise that requires the hiring of 4 to 4 dozen employees. The entrepreneurs, who use credit to invest in the company’s kiln, looms, papermaking machines, and energy systems, now have a sustainable way to make goods that they can sell. These products do well in local markets because they serve as simple, cheap way to fill basic needs.
Using its own cheap mud bricks, Development Alternatives built a massive, orange-hued headquarter of 150 employees that consumes the same amount of electricity as a single American household. With those same bricks, one of the company’s customers built the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in 180 days at a cost of $ 40,000. Khosla’s company is signing up franchises in hundreds of new locations, collecting ongoing royalty and training fees from each one. Khosla also makes money by data mining and by running an Internet portal, tarahaat.com for communicating with franchisees and customers.

In all these ways, invention is leading to economic growth in the areas most in need of it.

Is it not a mission that demands attentions of more and more Indians that have achieved what they dreamt for their materialistic lives, but have not done much to payback the Rashtra-reen?

- Indra

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