Saga of Innovations – breakthroughs and Jugaads

Asoke K. Laha, President & MD, Interra IT

There are good number of people who believe that technology may play a bigger role in medical science than the medical practitioners, so much so that the global IT companies like Google, Apple, Amazon are recruiting medical practitioners and are opening special divisions within their set up to pioneer devices and equipment that can help digitize medical sciences and to take medical science and treatments closer to people. Some of them are working on redefining the medical science with the help of technology and newer concepts. Health is replaced by the word wellness. Of course, wellness is a wider concept and that underscores use of concepts and devices to help ward off diseases to make people fit and trim. Smart watches attached to smartphones are in vogue. Doctors are trying to develop devices to track blood pressure like what a glucometer can do.Yet another set of scientists are working on genome based customized medicines. Scientists are on the verge of developing a device for detecting the best time for  a woman conceiving children and also for preserving eggs taken at the time of ovulation to be fertilized later. Experiments galore! One thing that runs across these experiments is its direct benefit to the people, to ordinary and extraordinary people.

Gaming is another field where technology is bringing radical changes.  We are all aware of the blockchain, which disrupted the financial services and how people do business and exchange their goods and services using that medium. Admittedly, blockchains based on the  use of algorithms is increasingly  getting acceptance across the world.  But the same technology is disrupting many other disciplines including gaming and would intensify the explosive growth of electronic sports. The uses in this field could be for extending the life of a game, to make it more interesting and to provide experiences, which the players never experienced before. I am told there is a game called Cooking Mama, where players are tasked to innovate new recipes. Players can change the recipe and cook new delicacies. The private codes generated for each player can help them to hold on to the recipe after the competitionand can get even a patent to commercialize that. 

Innovations can take place even at the grassroot level and not necessarily in the confines of state-of-the-art laboratories or incubators. I understand that there is a new terminology called Jugaad innovation to categorize such breakthroughs. They may look simple and Spartan but can considerably enhance the quality of life of a common man.

Let me take the example of a village school girl from Kerala, Remya Jose. She was concerned about her mother, who was sick and had to toil hard with household chores including washing the clothes of the family members. To reduce the drudgery of her mother she invented a washing machine cum exercise machine, which can run without electricity by peddling a bicycle like equipment. Her video was telecast by Discovery Channel in 2007.   Another person who shot to fame is  Jalagaon based Sheikh Jahangir, who invented a multi-purpose machine using mobile spray-painting device and four second hand scooters into a super machine, which can work as a mobile sugar cane making unit, a generator, a flour mill and a washing machine. It is a rare feat by an ordinary boy from nondescript village.

Let me take an example of a sugar cane juice extractor. The previous avatar of the juice expeller was one which was handled manually by physically rotating a steering like thing. Of course, those who have got a delicate stomach would become victim of the unhygienic process of juice extraction. Later the juice expellers were connected with a motor and extraction was done mechanically. A breakthrough came when the expeller was connected to a motor to make the process automatic. Now, the vendors use the motor  to convert the expeller as a vehicle for moving from one place  to the other, which earlier they carried in a cart.  I am sure very soon they would hit with an idea to extract juice in a hygienic manner, without any intervention of the human being. That would mean washing the sugar cane in clear water, plucking it from the stored place, keeping it in the expeller and collecting the juice, all by the machine. It may not be a far- fetched idea to have an automated machine, which can prepare sugar cane juice to suit your palate using artificial intelligence, wherein one can feed the preferences like the right quantum of ice to be added, whether it should have sprinklings of lemon juice etc.  If such innovations do take place, very soon people would turn to natural drinks, which are made hygienically compared to the bottled beverages.

Globally, there have been many innovations that have either reduced the drudgery or made things easier. I was told of a Folding Microscope, an innovation born out of   a project commissioned with resources donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The innovator is an Indian - Manu Prakash at Stanford. Microscope can be assembled from a punched sheet of cardstock, a spherical glass lens, an LED and diffuser panel, and a watch battery.  The device can be used to diagnose infectious diseases and costs less than Rs 70 rupees a piece.

The MittiCool Refrigerator is a class apart. Conceived by a 10th-grade dropout selling tea at Wankaner in Gujarat, this equipment  had evinced a fair degree of world attention. Mansukh Prajapati, the innovator  owns the MittiCool brand that makes and distributes an array of home appliances from clay that keeps food articles cool and resists decay. MittiCool is now working on clay houses that keeps inhabitants cool in summers and warm in winters.

There is also the story of Ice Stupas built by Sonam Wangchuk, an engineer from Ladakh and of Three Idiots fame, who came up with the idea conical ice mounds looking like mini-glaciers, which releases water for the farming season. For this pioneering effort, Wangchuk received the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2016. Sonam Wangchuk, the real Phunsuk Wangdu, was conferred the Magsaysay Award in August 2018.

My esteemed readers may indeed ask me what I am really trying to drive home. There are two things that I want to underline. There are innovative and out of box people who tries to do things differently, think differently and act differently. The world may dub them as non-conformists or  crazy but almost all inventions and discoveries have come from such crazy people and not from the people who think in a linear manner and not keen to experiment.  I can add a third factor and that I would call an urge to create something new. A society can only flourishes if this passion for innovation is practiced and encouraged widely. After all the world belongs to the future and we need to accept that with courage and openness to innovation.