Got a good idea? Now let's get innovative about selling it-Special Report-Sunday Specials-Opinion-The Times of India

A bamboo windmill created by a farmer from Assam (TOI Photo)

Consider this: The number of patent applications filed by India in 2002 was 9,000. In the same year, China filed about 180,000, and US about 380,000. In India, 2000 patents were approved versus over 100,000 for China. Also, India’s record for new designs was 39 versus 53,000 for China. These figures are from CII’s National Innovation Mission Report, released in May 2007.

If necessity is the mother of invention, a poor country like India should have produced many more innovations. "To cope with stress (whether economic or ecological or technological), the lesser material resources we have, the more creative we have to be," says IIMA professor Anil Gupta, who’s also president of Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions and the executive vice-chairperson of National Innovation Foundation.

His Honey Bee Network - which identifies individual innovators, provides them financial and technical assistance, helps them file for patents and devises models for self-sustenance - has so far mobilised over 75,000 innovations and traditional knowledge practices from over 500 districts.

Yet, even the handful of Indians who manage to create something new remain mostly unsung. For instance, do you know that Mohd Mehtar Hussain, a 37-year-old farmer from Assam has developed a low-cost windmill unit using bamboo and strips of tyres? Gupta cites many examples: Like 24-year-old student-farmer Mustaq Ahmad Dar from Anantnag in J&K, who has created a portable device to climb trees and poles with which one can ascend 50 feet in less than five minutes; or 40-year-old A Muruganantham from Coimbatore who has developed a mini sanitary napkin machine, with a production cost of about Re 1 per pad.

Why do these brilliant innovations seldom get translated into successfully marketed products? "The main bottleneck is finances," says Shrashtant Patara, senior programme director, technology systems, at Development Alternatives, an NGO that creates products and technologies for sustainable development.

"In rural areas, innovators don’t have deep pockets." They depend on credit from banks or public bodies, which can often be a long-drawn process. "Things would change drastically if the government were to fast-track credit availability," says Patara. The other hindrance is entrepreneurship itself: "Most innovators don’t make good entrepreneurs," says Gupta. "The challenge is to find entrepreneurs who would like to invest in new products or processes." Or else, as Patara points out, innovators have to be trained in marketing, management and sales.

Bangalore-based Sameer Sawarkar and Rajeev Kumar experienced this first hand when they launched Neurosynaptic Communications in 2003. The company provides healthcare in rural areas through telemedicine, and has developed a $400 portable kit that records BP, temperature, ECG and auscultation sounds of a stethoscope, the results of which can be transmitted to the closest medical centre. "We had to show the model with a lot of data to a lot of people before we attracted any interest," says Sawarkar, named among Technology Pioneers 2008 by the World Economic Forum. "Business models have to be worked out properly and one has to be highly resourceful to draw partners and investors."

The ride ahead may seem bumpy enough, but with the right roadmap we may get there. After all, as Gupta says, "There is no dearth of people with ideas."

pallavi.srivastava@timesgroup.com