India's amazing world of frugal innovation

Prajapati designed a low-cost clay fridge which required no electricity and continued to function in the event of major catastrophes or blackouts such as the one that devastated his village in 2001.

Prajapati's invention is part of a growing trend in India that has become known as "frugal innovation" below the radar inventors across the country devising low cost solutions to local problems, often borne of necessity, using bespoke technologies of their own creation.

At the forefront of the frugal innovation movement is Professor Anil Gupta who, for the last 20 years, has been travelling across India in search of local inventors whose creativity has had a positive impact on rural poverty. In 1989, Gupta founded the Honey Bee Network, an organization that uncovers grassroots inventors, and helps bring their inventions to the world. "I have walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years," says Gupta. "I have tried to map the minds of people who are creating around the country."

By his own reckoning, Gupta believes that the Honey Bee Network has helped unearth over 25,000 new inventions, including a motorbike-mounted crop sprayer, a device for climbing trees, an amphibious bicycle and a wind-powered irrigation system. Mansukhbhai Patel invented a cotton-stripping machine that can be operated by one person. Professor Gupta believes the invention has helped significantly reduce child labor in the region. 

Frugal Digital, a research group run by the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, seeks to promote exactly this kind of invention. The group runs projects in conjunction with Indian inventors to build cheap,"hackable" devices to solve enduring problems across the subcontinent.

Kirsten Bound, the author of Nesta's believes that the philosophy of frugal innovation and the practice of repurposing technology could be applied globally. "Frugal innovation coming out of India could have important implications for the rest of the world". 

Professor Anil Gupta meets local Indian inventors

Gupta says there is work to be done yet in connecting creative people with funding, and not all of it can come from the public purse. According to Gupta, connecting grassroots technologists with big business will be key to development not just in India, but around the world. "Nothing," he says, "can justify preventing people from learning from one another."