Prof. Anil Kumar Gupta, vice chairman of National Innovation Foundation (NIF) and founder of the Honey Bee Network, a knowledge network for augmenting grassroots innovation, has been diligently scouting for and documenting traditional practices as well as encouraging technologies in rural India since establishing this initiative in 1989. His efforts, which promote and cross-pollinate grassroots entrepreneurships, have resulted in more than 120,000 inventions so far. Prof. Gupta is also a top faculty at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, one of the best business schools in the country, for nearly three decades. Edited excerpts from an interview with Jyoti Malhotra for The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: Prof. Gupta, you started the Honey Bee Network in 1989. Can you tell us why and what your experiences have been these past 20 years?


Anil Kumar Gupta

AKG: I have always been interested in the knowledge of people, but I wasn't very conscious of their innovative potential. Around 1979-80 I was a doing a study in Mahendragarh district, not far from Delhi, part of a project on action research in six drought prone districts and met a farmer, Ramnivas Sharma from Jhanjali Awas village in this regard. I remember he told me how he and other farmers understood how their crop would perform by looking at weeds and the flowering pattern of those weeds. Now that was very intriguing, that people had been able to establish a correlation between different species and that one of the species registered changes in the environment and climate much earlier than the other crop they were growing. Meaning, they were able to anticipate the manner in which the weather would unfold. Now, in a rained region understanding weather is the crux of the matter, it is like a gamble. It was not surprising that farmers had ways of identifying the weather, but for me it was intriguing.

Then in 1985 I went to Bangladesh after a bureaucrat read a paper of mine on the sociology of land-use planning and spent a year helping scientists learn from poor people. I discovered such a great creativity among the tenants and landless farmers of Bangladesh that I was completely overawed. For my efforts I was paid in dollars. But when I returned home…see I was young, I come from a lower middle class frugal family, so when I was being paid in dollars, there was guilt. I asked myself the question : Did I get paid so well because I am a bright, brilliant professor, or because the people whom I wrote about were brilliant? If it was the latter, then logically my income-tax returns should have reflected the fact that at least a part of my income was a result of documenting other people's knowledge and that a share should go to them. But of course, there was no such thing.

At the time, my friends used to accuse me of being a socialist-minded person interested in the exploitation of poor people by landlords and money lenders. It appeared now that I was also an exploiter. The moneylenders exploited the money market, landlords exploited the labor market, the traders exploited the commodity market, but I was an intellectual and I was exploiting the ideas market. I was taking the knowledge of people, writing about it, but very little of that went back to people because I wrote mostly in English, and people as you know, don't understand English language in villages. So, that created lot of guilt, which was traumatic for someone like me who thought he was very sensitive. A soul-searching began. I did a review of the literature on ethical dilemmas in value conflicts, I read a lot about Project Camelot. It occurred to me that while my dilemma was not unique, the solution would have to be.

One day as I was returning, I don't know whether I saw a honey bee, but the thought came to my mind… Honey bees do what intellectuals don't do. They collect nectar from flowers, but the flowers don't complain. In fact, flowers attract the honey bee. The bee not only connects one flower to another flower, but also does not keep the honey for itself. I realized that if I could share what I did with the people in their language, that is, give them credit and don't keep them anonymous, if I helped them learn from each other…and if I did extract any rent from this effort, and if a reasonable share went back to them, then I could be like a honeybee. That would be an ethical, authentic way of living.

I was already conscious about the creativity and knowledge of farmers, but the question was, how was one to frame that knowledge? So, from the first issue of the Honey Bee newsletter I wanted to create a culture where we would demystify ourselves. Instead of taking credit for other people's ideas, we would ask these people to write about their experiences.

WSJ: Are you saying that in social science research, credit is not given where it is due?

AKG: Yes ! Fellow scientists must of course be credited, but this is only for the formal sector. For the informal sector there is no such requirement. On the contrary, all informal sources dialogues must be kept anonymous! Research councils and academic institutions have not yet begun to share their findings with people in languages they understand. Which means 99.9% of the research is never shared back with the people from whom it is collected.

WSJ: It sounds like plagiarism of the highest order…

AKG: It is, and the tragedy is that this continues. The basic ethics of the knowledge economy is that you learnt something from somewhere, you did not get it from the air.

WSJ: Basically, you are seeking to humanize the anonymous…

AKG: Yes, as well as speeding up people-to-people learning, which on its own may take centuries, sometimes not at all. We have found solutions in China and India and many other countries which have been developed independently and sometimes with a lot of lag…People should be able to learn from each other. If somebody has found a good solution, why can't other people learn from it? Particularly, when this is about poor people for whom science and big technology labs do not work. The so-called "inclusive" social development model will only work when people are able to communicate and link up with other people in other regions, solving other problems...So if you use this knowledge for commercial gain, develop a drug based on it or whatever else, you must share the profit with those from where you got the knowledge in the first place.

WSJ: Give me an example…

AKG: For example, about 6-7 years ago we pooled together the knowledge of six communities in Gujarat, developed a formulation for eczema and licensed this technology to a company called Troika Pharmaceutical. Troika took it to the market under the brand name Herbavit. If you go to a chemist and you ask for Herbavit you might get a tube there, they export it too. They gave a royalty of 5% to the 6 Gujarati communities… We have developed an elaborate beneficiary model where the community must be consulted too, besides the individual rural entrepreneur. The royalty is divided between the entrepreneur, the community as well as used for regenerating "nature."

WSJ: How much royalty did Troika give?

AKG: Troika didn't give too much royalty, about 50,000 rupees ($1040) per year. But there was another case where six different technologies were licensed to a company in Hyderabad who dealt in herbal pesticides, where they gave advance royalty of 150,000 rupees-200,000 rupees. Some of the tribals in Dangs district (in Gujarat) had never seen a cheque of 25,000 rupees.

WSJ: How many innovations do you have today, and in what areas?

AKG: We have 120,000 innovations, ideas and traditional knowledge practices in all 545 districts of India as well as in all areas – energy, transport, agriculture, food processing, herbal drugs, veterinary drugs, human drugs, agricultural inputs, horticulture, utilities...

WSJ: All this is in the last 20 years?

AKG: From 1988-89 to 1993 we had about 5000 innovations -- when I got the Pew Conservation Scholar Award from the University of Michigan, $150,000 dollars for three years, which I used to do so many things which would have been impossible otherwise. In 1997 at an international conference of Creativity in Innovation at IIM, I asked whether Honey Bee or Sristi, another organization that we had set up, should stop documenting traditional practices because we were unable to do anything about the lives of poor people. That's when the Gujarat government came forward and we set up GIAN (Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network). By 1998, we had reached the figure of 10,000 innovations. In 1999, I proposed to the government to set up a foundation which would scale up the work nationally. The National Innovation Foundation (NIF) came into being in 2000, but my proposal of 2,000 million rupees was whittled down to 200 million rupees, because, the government said, it had already spent a lot of money at Kargil (when India and Pakistan fought an armed conflict.).

The idea was to scout and document, add value, do business development, fight patents, etc. Those goals are already in place. With the help of NIF we have been able to scale up many more times and innovations have gone up from 10,000 in 2000 to 120,000 in 2009. But our budget has remained constant.

Then in 2003, we created the Macro Venture Innovation Fund with the help of the government-owned Small-scale Industry Development Board of India. In 2007 we started a special campaign for Children's Innovations, called IGNITE, for which we give awards away on October 15, the birthday of our former President Dr. Abdul Kalam. We have come across such wonderful ideas from children that it is mind boggling ! Meanwhile, we have a portal, www.techpedia.sristi.org, for technology projects by students, where we already have a database of 10,000 projects by students in all the major universities and colleges. The idea being to build a bridge between informal sector innovators and these students.

WSJ: Are you able to build that bridge?

AKG: Let me give you a few examples of bridging with outstanding results. We got a herbal drug for typhoid from Jharkhand which we gave to a virology lab of the Indian Council for Medical Research in Kolkata. The drug worked in patients otherwise resistant to the best drugs in the market. Now imagine what that means! It means that a typhoid organism which is becoming resistant is now being controlled by a herbal drug from Jharkhand. But how would the man who created this herbal drug ever understand the potential? So this bridge is necessary, to use the best of science to scrutinize and validate the best of informal science. If all goes well, we are on the threshold of a very good drug breakthrough.

Then there was a herbal fruit ripener from a Orissa tribal who used to use this leaf to ripen bananas. We were intrigued because this had never been recorded in literature. So, we gave this ripener to the top Central Science & Industrial Research lab in Mysore that is involved in food processing. They found something remarkable, especially since all the fruit ripening the world over is done by chemicals. The lab found that the leaf not only ripened the fruit, but also changed the ratio of reducing to non-reducing sugars. That is, good sugars like dextrose, maltose -- which our body needs, unlike sucrose and fructose which our body does not need as much -- were increased, while the bad sugars were decreased. That is, the fruit not only became sweeter but healthier. There is no report of this kind in the literature, that in the process of ripening you can also change the composition of sugar. This again is a breakthrough research.

Similarly, there was a research done in the Institute of Himalayan Biodiversity Technologies , Palanpur, a CSIR lab, where they have a centre for excellence for herbal pesticides. There was a formulation of two or three plants from Gujarat having 'neem' as one of the ingredients. 'Neem' as we know controls pests, nothing special about that, but it is a very unstable compound. In light it decomposes very fast. So this scientist took each plant one by one. First he took 'neem,' which he exposed to ozone light for two minutes to 20 minutes. As the light exposure increased the diversion increased. But the moment he added another plant to the formulation it became a straight line, that is, it had stabilized the formulation.

Now, there is no report of a herbal indigent stabilizing a chemical, a constituent of 'neem.' This is also a first report of its kind.

Then there is the example of the Bombay Veterinary College which took up a lead from our database for mastisis, which is an infection in the udder of the cattle. We gave them a tube of this herbal formulation that we had developed based on the research that Bombay Veterinary College had done… they found that it cured mastisis faster than any drug. Now a government-owned company in Karnataka called Karnataka Antibiotic is going to commercialize this drug.

These examples show that the frontiers of science and technology are being pushed forward by grassroots innovators, not only in the resolution of problems but in an unprecedented manner.

Our innovators have worked in veterinary medicine, food processing, herbal medicine, human medicine, as well as in several other areas, like energy…in Assam, Mehtab Hussain and Mushtaq Hussain developed a bamboo windmill for pumping water only for 5,000 rupees. We brought it to Kutch (in Gujarat) to pump out salt water from the ground, as salt workers are the poorest of the poor and they had to spend 40,000 rupees to 50,000 rupees worth of diesel every season of six months. We modified the windmill, from bamboo to metal, and it now costs about 50,000 rupees, which the farmer will make free in two seasons because he will no longer need to buy the diesel. Less pollution, more renewable energy and the salt farmer becomes free of the clutches of money lenders.

WSJ: The argument behind your work is that small is beautiful. But is small really beautiful? You do need a sense of scale, right?

AKG: Let me tell you one thing. Scale should never be made the enemy of sustainability. In other words, if some solutions don't diffuse do they become less legitimate?. Are problems of small communities less important than problems which affect a large number of people?

Sustainability doesn't mean that the same solution applies everywhere, because nature is essentially diverse. But we are trying to remove diversity by scaling up solutions. When I say that one variety of a Green Revolution seed, or fertilizer or pesticide should be used everywhere, what I am really saying is that I don't recognize the diversity of the soil, the micro flora and fauna. To me everything is alike because I am treating it alike. But the truth is that it is not alike. By treating it as such, it creates more problems because what was not uniform is being treated as uniform, which means the dissimilarities and variabilities became more manifest. Today's farmers find it is so difficult to control disease because pests have become resistant to the pesticide, soils have become depleted of the micro-nutrients because we have been mining them for so long. This model is not sustainable.

WSJ: But how would you document and disseminate the idea of diversity in a large country like ours ?

AKG: We wish that every village has a Village Knowledge Register. In fact I have argued that under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, where the government is spending 390 billion rupees to give 100 days of employment to 250 million people, each person should spend 10 days out of the 100 days in mapping the knowledge of their community. Now, imagine, in a country of India's size, the mind of that society will be mapped by 250 million people every year ! Every year new ideas will come, new efforts will be made, new breeds and insects surface, other insects and birds disappear…We will be able to map biological resources, the human mind, our cultural diversity, folk tales, put it on the web, create e-commerce platforms…

WSJ: Ideally you should be connecting with private industry…

AKG: Well, I went to Ludhiana for our cycle-based innovations because I thought Ludhiana was the cycle capital of the country. Young Munjal (of Hero Honda) was in the chair but he didn't bother, because as he said to me very honestly over dinner, "Look Professor, we are doing good business and making a lot of money, where is the need for us to change? "

They were being honest. Their aspirations didn't imply that they needed to change the way market works because that is the right way, or because a lot of people can generate jobs by using the cycle for lot of other things. They believe that the cycle can only be used for transportation, when in fact it can be used for spraying pesticide and pumping water! They don't realize that ! We have innovations where the cycle is used for sprayers, as well as for generating energy…Who is going to develop those attachments to the cycle? But it is not in the interest of big manufacturers.

I was told by Munjal, you don't change gears when the going is good. I said yes, you are right. So do you want me to wish that your going becomes bad so that you listen to me? I wouldn't like to wish you that !

WSJ: So you feel that big business is disinterested in small innovations?

AKG: Yes. The Tatas went to France to get compressed air technology, but Kanak Gogoi in Guwahati has made a car which runs on compressed air, not fuel, and costs 0.06 rupees per kilometer . The Tatas went to France to get this technology. I wrote to the executive director of Tata Sons the same day I read about his trip in the newspapers, but he didn't reply. I felt so sad about it. Big business is simply not interested.

I was on the jury of the Tata Innovation Awards last year, what can be a big honor than that? I was judging the technologies of Tata companies all over the world, Corus and what have you, along with (space scientist) Kasturirangan and one more person. They had asked us to invite two innovators, so I invited an automobile innovator from Guwahati, Shivshankar Mandal, who has made a modification in the three wheeler engine to make it more fuel efficient. But Tata Motors were not interested.

There was also a sanitary napkin machine innovator from Tamil Nadu. Now only 5% rural women use sanitary napkins and we know the kind of hygiene problems that exist. This man makes it for 1.50 rupees to two rupees per napkin and he has designed a vending machine for it, but he has only sold about 57 such machines to different groups in India in 7 states. Which Self-Help Group, which Federation, which women's organization, or ministry is interested? None.

WSJ: Why do you think they are not interested?

AKG: Incidentally, we have sold technologies to several countries abroad…My feeling is that once some of these foreign companies begin to use them, Indian companies will follow. Thing is, India is a free country but our minds are still colonized. People still feel that good technology still comes from abroad.

WSJ: Perhaps you have to position your work differently?

AKG: Perhaps. We have so far got 57 licenses, but we have shown that even if big business isn't interested, small entrepreneurs are. In fact, several small entrepreneurs have paid large sums of money for the right to manufacture and market technologies which have not even been patented, when they could copy them. We have proved the unthinkable, that the small entrepreneur in this country are ethical men and women.

WSJ: But why isn't government interested either?

AKG: Well, we hope that government schools will be….The problem with government is that they are not comfortable with a diversified model like ours, they are much more comfortable with a uniform, centralized dispensation. But our day will come. We have filed 220 patents in India and have been granted 35, while 5 have been granted in the U.S. One community which has given us a lot of help is the lawyer community. Intellectual property rights lawyers don't charge us commercial fees, Boston Consulting didn't even charge us a single paisa. They have given us about $100,000 worth of time free.

Perhaps you are right, in the last 20 years we may have done a good job with scouting and innovation, but we need to do an equally great job with dissemination.

WSJ: How do you make the connection, from grassroots to global?

AKG: A lot of institutions abroad teach what we do, at Harvard, MIT and at George Washington University. These faculties send their students to us…I will be honest, our models and our strategies are taught much more abroad than at home.

WSJ: How does cross-pollination work?

AKG: Often technologies can have cross-sectoral applications. For example, the technology discovered by a groundnut digger from Rajasthan was bought by an entrepreneur in Visakhapatnam for making a sea-beach cleaner. The groundnut-digger collects the groundnuts, sieves the soil and keeps the nuts. Similarly, the sea-beach collects the sand, sieves the debris and moves on. The general principle is, the farther the domain of application from the domain of origin, the higher rent you can extract.

Secondly, there are a lot of poor people even in developed countries. For example, Remya Jose from Palghat, Kerala has made a washing machine-cum-exercising machine, where the act of pedaling the stationary cycle runs the machine which washes clothes..We have received many queries from the U.K. and U.S. about this !

WSJ: Are you also arguing that just like high technology can be self-innovating or blended, so can grassroots entrepreneurship?

AKG: Yes, our argument is very simple. We should not be heard on compassionate grounds, but on the grounds of efficiency, affordability and inclusiveness, that we are able to bring solutions to people who otherwise remain untouched by the solutions available in the market place today. Pay attention to us not because we work with poor people, and that is why you should buy our products, but because we make economic sense. We don't want compassionate buying.

WSJ: What do you mean by the concept, 'technology commons' or 'creative commons'?

AKG: We argue that when technology moves from person to person, then copying should not only be allowed but encouraged, but not when it moves from person to company, or company to company. We don't want intellectual property rights to prevent one farmer from learning from another farmer.

WSJ: Do you think the IP system itself should be reformed?

AKG: Yes, we believe we should have a shorter term, quicker protection for implemental innovations and that a lot of people can be given non-exclusive rights at very low licensing cost so that you get a polycentric model, where a large number of entrepreneurs make products in different markets for different users. It may appear utopian, you might call this a Gandhian dream. But after 20 years I have at least earned the right to dream !

WSJ: Is there a risk of sacrificing grassroots content when you go international?

AKG: No, on the contrary. Question is, what can people maximize if not their knowledge and values, and what can they minimize if not their material? So we are doing what sustainability requires, that is, knowledge-intensive innovations, not material-intensive innovations. We are doing what the world needs. The world needs fewer materials because more materials cause entropy, and entropy as you know, is the second law of thermodynamics that causes disorder. All the junk in the world, all the pollution is because of materials. If you use less material you have less pollution, less junk, less load on the environment. So from the point of view of sustainability, we need to have more knowledge and not less. This is the only thing the poor have in abundance. So they maximize that and minimize the materials because that is what is scarce. You don't expect poor people to maximize material because they don't have it in the first place.

Second, there is no chance of grassroots knowledge being marginalized. In areas like herbal pesticides, veterinary medicine, herbal medicine, food processing, etc, grassroots knowledge is going to provide the answer for the sustainable lifestyle of urban consumers.

WSJ: Isn't this completely contradictory to the laws of economics…?

AKG: No. For example, if you knew that the pain in your joints or your mother's joints is caused, among other things, by boron deficiency and boron is much more prevalent in the local varieties of maize than hybrid maize, and that the varieties of maize that are grown on dry land have more boron because the soil contains more boron…So, instead of taking action after the problem occurs, if you start eating maize from dry lands – something people in Africa have known for years -- you will hugely reduce the incidence of joint pains which is a chronic problem in our country. It will save you the burden of costly treatment.

Why should this be against the law of economics? It may be against the law of the current market-based models where the more democratic forms of health, which is preventive, is under-invested and the more costly forms of health, which is curative, is over-invested. That is true. That market will not accept what I am saying. But who cares !

WSJ: Market based economics argues that you have to spend more to earn more, which basically means that your usage of materials or resources goes up…

AKG: Look, go to any mall in Delhi and you will get one kind of tomato, one kind of cucumber, one kind of brinjal, because that is the best way to optimize your supply chain and display. But don't tell me that there aren't five different kinds of nutrient combinations that cannot be grown by five different communities. Problem is, all the documents on marketing only discuss verticals, but what is wrong with discussing horizontals?. For example, shouldn't one village buy products from another village, especially if that village grows more of 'banti', 'nagli' or some local millet and this village grows more vegetables because it is better irrigated? Why shouldn't there be trade between the villages? Because, that will require a different supply chain ! So I say, just redesign the markets!

WSJ: You sound like you're arguing against the laws of globalization..

AKG: I am arguing against the laws of globalization as they have evolved so far. But I am not against globalization. Otherwise "grassroots to global" cannot work. I am saying that markets for niche products, nationally and internationally, need to emerge. Nature is diverse and the world should be diverse. The world is interesting because it is diverse.

Wine is a good example of a product where market has favored diversity. There are wineries only 100 acres large which produce only 1000 bottles of wine a year. Similarly, with honey, which can be based on the jasmine or mango or other flowers…These two are my favorite examples, where markets have reinforced diversity and small scale sourcing but with global scale consumption.

WSJ: But India has changed in these 20 years, we have become much more homogenous, haven't we?

AKG: We have become much more Westernized. Don't use the word homogenous. You are using Westernization as a proxy for homogenization. When I go to the villages I find a lot of young people who are beginning to ask questions about change, how to bring about change that will suit them most, not by simply aping others.

In December 2007, I was in a village in Bankura (in West Bengal) and a young boy called Bappi Roy came up with the idea of producing a four-sided television set so that the village could sit around it…We have filed a patent for him and are now in the act of getting such a TV fabricated. It doesn't matter whether the idea succeeds or not, the point is that the idea came from Bappi Roy of Vasudha village in Bankura, not from Samsung or Philips.

WSJ: Those are very Gandhian ideas, Professor...

AKG: I would say that what is good in Gandhi is that he talked about the distributive, polycentric model of development, which means that a large number of small and medium enterprises should be involved in solving problems. I have nothing against large corporations, but I think a democracy requires large number of sources of entrepreneurial growth. Any monopolies of any kind are antithetical to democracy. I am a democrat, I want this society to remain democratic. Grassroots innovators guarantee democracy the best.

WSJ: Last question, do you think rural India has been able to tolerate this recession in creative ways?

AKG: Well, I will tell you, rural folk are more concerned about each other, and have been exchanging information, goods and services even more. There are places where the rains have failed or nearly failed, there is a very great crisis of that kind but there is also much more resilience. For us, one or two years of great meltdown shock us. For poor people, for whom droughts take place three out of five years, this is a way of life. Poor people are far more resilient and therefore they are able to somehow manage. It is true that every time there is a crisis they dispose of some of their assets and become poorer. But at the same time those who talk about the poor at the base of the growing economic pyramid as consumers…I say to these people, look at the poor as providers, many may be at the bottom of the economic pyramid, but many are also at the top of the innovation pyramid.

WSJ: Thank you very much.