Indian Innovation, Not Jugaad - 100 Ideas that Transformed India

By Dinesh C. Sharma

Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based award-winning journalist and author with over thirty-five years’ of professional experience. He has written extensively on science and technology, climate change, health, environment and innovation for national and international media, including The Lancet and Wired. He has been Science Editor at Mail Today, and Managing Editor at India Science Wire and is currently the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (2020-2021). His book The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution was awarded the Computer History Museum Book Prize in 2016. He has also been a visiting faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila. Dinesh Sharma tweets at @dineshcsharma

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Jan 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9789392130083

Book preview

As India turns 75, Indian Innovation unpacks 100 ideas that transformed a young democratic republic into a complex and thriving nation of a billion-plus people. With compelling urgency and the lucidity of a skilled narrator, Dinesh C. Sharma writes of an India newly independent in 1947 after the British colonial powers left it to its own destiny, of its subsequent wavering journey through the decades all the way to a raging pandemic and of the small and big innovations that paved the way for India.

In doing so, he turns on their heads prevailing notions of innovation often propagated in a galaxy of books on the much used and abused narrative of jugaad that romance the idea of how the ‘poor’ innovate to get by. Very often, a bulk of the writing heavily focuses on technological, novel, IT or digital solutions and disruptions alone, many of which fizzle out as one-time wonders.

Sharma does the difficult job of writing about the original disruptions that revolutionized the way things were done in a particular sector and context. Covering policies, concepts, and institutions in areas such as, but not limited to, science, healthcare, education, governance, business, grassroots movements, agriculture, fashion, law and others, this is a book one needs to read to better understand India.

Propulsively put together with effortless prose, Sharma’s writing, with his decades’ long journalistic understanding of science, technology, environment, and communities, is teeming with stories and anecdotes of innovations that went on to change the lives of Indians forever. From software parks to shampoo sachets, jan sunwais to oxygen langars, Lijjat papad to mohalla clinics, the Chipko movement to Khabar Lahariya, this is also the story of the unknown, unsung people behind these innovations who are continuing to shape India as we know it.

OTHER LOTUS TITLES

FORTHCOMING TITLE

ROLI BOOKS

This digital edition published in India, 2022

The Lotus Collection

An Imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

M-75, Greater Kailash- II Market

New Delhi 110 048

Phone: ++91 (011) 40682000

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.rolibooks.com

© Dinesh C. Sharma, 2022

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, print reproduction, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Roli Books. Any unauthorized distribution of this e-book may be considered a direct infringement of copyright and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

eISBN: 978-93-92130-08-3

All rights reserved.

This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or cover other than that in which it is published.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I. The Revolutions

1. Green Revolution

2. White Revolution

3. Blue Revolution

4. Yellow Revolution

5. The Egg Revolution

6. IT Revolution

7. Communication Revolution

II. Food, Water and Sanitation

8. The Swaraj Tractor

9. India Mark II Deep Well Pump

10. Midday Meal Scheme

11. Ready-mixes for Indian Foods

12. Food for Work

13. Integrated Child Development Scheme

14. Right to Food

15. Sulabh Toilets

III. Health and Medical Research

16. National Family Planning Programme

17. ASHA

18. Generic Drugs

19. Affordable Vaccines

20. Pulse Polio

21. Aravind Eyecare Model

22. Affordable Heart Surgery

23. Universal Iodization of Salt

24. The Jaipur Foot

25. Oral Rehydration Therapy

26. Mohalla Clinics

27. Home-based Palliative Care

28. Open-source Drug Discovery

29. Swasthya Sahayak

30. Green Corridor for Organ Transplants

31. FELUDA and Low-cost Ventilators

32. Oxygen Langar

IV. Transport and Mobility

33. Three-wheeled Scooter Rickshaws

34. Maruti 800

35. REVA Electric Car

36. Delhi Metro Rail

37. E-rickshaws

38. Air Deccan: Affordable Air Travel

39. The Golden Quadrilateral

40. Yulu Shared E-bike

V. Information and Communication Technologies

41. Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE)

42. Software Technology Parks

43. STD/PCO

44. Internet Kiosks

45. Simputer

46. Missed Call Marketing

47. Online Matchmaking

48. Chota Recharge

49. Traditional Knowledge Digital Database

VI. Governance, Public Utilities and Law

50. Indelible Ink and Other Ideas

51. Electronic Voting Machines

52. Computerized Passenger Railway Reservations

53. Bhoomi

54. Lok Adalats

55. Employment Guarantee

56. Public Interest Litigation

57. Cyclone Warning

58. Right to Information

59. Social Audits

60. Unique Identification (UID)/Aadhaar

61. Jan Dhan Yojana

VII. Education

62. Indian Institutes of Technology

63. Indian Institutes of Management

64. All India Institute of Medical Sciences

65. National Institute of Design

66. Total Literacy Campaign

67. Navodaya Vidyalaya

68. Birla Industrial and Technological Museum

69. Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research

70. Foldscopes

71. Happiness Curriculum

VIII. Grassroots Technologies and Movements

72. Improved Chulha

73. Nutan Wick Stove

74. Sachet Revolution

75. Sanitary Pad-making Machine

76. Honey Bee Network

77. Lijjat Papad

78. SEWA Microfinance Model

IX. Art, Culture, Cinema, Architecture, Sports

79. Playback Singing

80. Binaca Geet Mala

81. Indipop

82. SPIC-MACAY

83. Nehru Jacket

84. Designer Khadi

85. Festivals of India

86. Palace on Wheels

87. Dilli Haat

88. Birla Mandir

89. Chandigarh

90. Laurie Baker Architecture

91. Indian Premier League

X. Environment and People’s Movements

92. Project Tiger

93. Chipko Movement

94. Revival of Arvari

95. Navdanya Seed Bank

96. Dhara Vikas

97. Barefoot Engineers

98. Artificial Glaciers

99. Khabar Lahariya

100. MigrantWatch: Citizen Science

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Drawing up a mega list of innovations spanning decades and across sectors can be challenging, hazardous and vulnerable to criticism. Here is how I navigated through this.

To begin with, let’s look at the advantages. I have lived through a large part of the period the book covers. In that sense, it is broadly a journey of exploring innovations that impacted the lives of people of my generation. Procuring grains from a ration shop was a routine activity for millions of Indians in the 1960s. Kids would often be sent to ‘fair price’ shops to check if the stock of wheat had arrived. This was because the food supplies were erratic and dependent on imports. I also remember the images of lush green farms, signalling the Green Revolution, in the Films Division newsreels screened in cinema halls. Just as the grain supplies were easing, the Oil Shock hit us in the early 1970s, making kerosene scarcer. The response came in the form of a red-and-green wick stove named ‘Nutan’, which made its appearance in millions of Indian kitchens. Its blue flame became the talk of the town. The long waiting list for a landline phone connection, serpentine queues to book a railway ticket or trying to buy a car in ‘black’ were all part of the folklore of the 1970s and 1980s. Innovations and creative policy changes helped us address them all. The economic liberalization and globalization in the 1990s and beyond ushered in several changes. This lived experience was at the back of my mind while drawing up a list of post-Independence innovations.

In addition, my professional experience of writing a book on the history of electronics and computing a few years back has helped me develop a perspective of how changes occurred in these sectors. I also had a more recent template to start with. In 2017, when India turned seventy, I wrote a news story on ‘seven defining contributions of science and technology’ that have had ‘great social and economic impacts and had, directly and indirectly, touched the lives of ordinary Indians’. It was syndicated by India Science Wire and published in several news outlets. The seven contributions listed in the story were the Green Revolution, White Revolution, satellite and communication revolution, drugs and vaccine manufacturing, C-DOT and telecom revolution, information technology (IT) revolution and railway computerization, and the Blue Revolution. Around the same time, when the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) planned to publish an anthology, Indian Science Transforming India, its editor, L.S. Shashidhara, asked me to contribute a chapter.

Still, the task at hand was challenging on two counts – expanding the list to 100 and areas beyond science and technology. A third challenge was defining innovation. Here, my continued interactions with innovation guru, Professor Anil Gupta, as well as scores of grassroots innovators spotted and nurtured by him during the past two decades came in handy. These interactions have made me appreciate and see value in innovations beyond research laboratories and formal systems. My past exchanges with policymakers like the late Dr N. Seshagiri and N. Vittal convinced me that creative and ‘out of the box’ approaches can produce innovative ideas in rigid bureaucratic frameworks too. Many such ‘policy innovations’ feature in this book. The same holds good for ideas emanating from civil society movements, business and marketing, industry, entertainment and so on. That’s how the century in this book was scored.

The idea of this book originated from Chirag Thakkar, Commissioning Editor at Roli, who reached out to me first in August 2019 via my website. We discussed the possibility of a book on ‘100 transformative innovations’ in the lounge of India International Centre (IIC) over cookies and coffee. It set me thinking, and after a series of email exchanges, I had a draft list of innovations that we discussed at the Roli office with Priya Kapoor and the team. One of the valuable outcomes of the brainstorming was the need to highlight the people behind innovations and dissemination. A few close friends – historians, senior journalists, academics and social scientists – informally vetted the list or parts of it. Yet, I am conscious that the final list remains a subjective one and may attract criticism for overlooking some innovations while including others perceived as ‘less deserving’.

By the time I finally got down to writing, the pandemic was already knocking at India’s doors, rather, airports and ports. Most of the core writing was done during the lockdown and ‘unlocking’ period in the first half of 2020. I could write swiftly because the chapters are modular though connected in some ways. With ‘work from home’ setting in, everyone in the family – Annu, Maanvi and Kushagr – was around, making the writing exercise enjoyable and stimulating. I revised the text in 2021 – and updated the list to include pandemic-related ideas – while working from the IIC library, which provides a great ambience for serious writing work.

I am grateful to everyone who was part of the journey of this book, directly or indirectly. Special thanks are due to the editorial, design and marketing teams at Roli for their professional approach throughout this project.

Dinesh C. Sharma

New Delhi

July 2021

Introduction

India’s Innovation Journey

At the age of seventy-five, we are supposed to be past our prime and are expected to lead a quiet retired life. In the journey of a nation, however, seventy-five years is not a long period but certainly, it is time to pause and reflect. And perhaps an occasion for cautious celebration. India’s journey as an independent country began with the attainment of political freedom in 1947, but it was only the first step. The country was steeped in poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, ill health, irrationality, superstitions, inequality and injustice. The scars of long colonial rule were evident in all spheres of activity. A bunch of political leaders, scientists, engineers, industrialists and planners had done a great amount of spadework in the run-up to Independence, imagining a modern and self-reliant India. They envisaged science and technology as a major input in this process of regeneration and development. Converting these dreams – and plans – into reality was a tall order and needed massive resources and manpower. Ingenious ways had to be found to move forward and many people with the vision to find these ways did so. That’s what laid the foundation of an innovative India.

The first major test of the newly founded republic came in 1952 when the gigantic task of holding general elections in a country where barely 15 per cent of people could read and write posed a great challenge. It was addressed with novel visual communication methods to identify candidates and parties on the ballot paper, while the handicap imposed by the lack of proper identification documents was overcome with the use of indelible ink developed by Indian scientists. The streak of innovations in the election process continued with the invention of the electronic voting machine in 1979 by a public sector company revolutionizing the election process in the decades to come.

High-yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice, based on semi-dwarf varieties from Mexico, ushered in the Green Revolution. A tractor specially designed for the smaller size of an Indian landholding, aptly named ‘Swaraj’, played a catalyst in the process while bumper crops necessitated the development of post-harvest technologies, which in turn, gave birth to the instantfood industry. The innovation of ready-mixes of Indian sweets such as gulab jamuns and jalebis was a rage in Indian kitchens in the 1970s. Further equipping women was ‘Nutan’, a fuel-efficient kerosene stove developed in direct response to the oil shock of 1974. Around the same time began the drive to change the design of the ubiquitous wood-burning chulha (stove).

Developing human resources needed for building a modern nation was on top of the post-Independence agenda. A string of higher education institutions was founded in the fields of engineering, technology, medicine, management, agriculture, design, architecture and so on. Each of them was developed in a novel way – partnerships with the world’s leading universities, industry, philanthropists, state and central governments – with a special focus to ensure their functional autonomy. These centres of higher learning became the cradle of new ideas and technologies while providing high-quality manpower for government and industry, particularly for computer, communications and software revolutions, over the decades. Foundational work done at some of these institutions became the basis for the formulation of new national policies and programmes. The streak of institution-building was revived in the 1990s and the 2000s.

The Nehruvian era until the 1970s was marked by shortages, resulting from restrictive industrial policies and the focus on import-substitution. At that time, the waiting period for a telephone connection was several years. Personal cars were considered luxury products and car companies were allowed to manufacture only a limited number of cars. Even for a two-wheeler scooter, one had to wait for years. Innovative policies and products changed the situation dramatically in the 1980s. Dependence on imports in telecom ended with an electronic switch (the C-DOT rural exchange) developed for Indian conditions, in just thirty-six months. A revolutionary idea of making available the technology freely to the private sector broke the monopoly of foreign companies and helped in a rapid expansion of the telephone network. Access to telecom services was dramatically expanded through another innovation – public phone booths popularly known as STD PCOs. In the same way, Software Technology Parks were conceived to help small firms export software without owning data communication infrastructure. The computerization of the railway passenger reservation system is another example of a new technology benefiting the common man. In the 1990s, the land records’ computerization, Bhoomi, helped end petty corruption and eliminate middlemen. All these are great innovations, given that they took place in the pre-internet era and when access to even basic devices like landline telephones was low.

The shortage mentality gave rise to several innovations in product design and marketing of services. The ‘missed call’ is a classic example. When the mobile phone service was introduced, the call charges were very high and consumers had to pay even for receiving an incoming call. This gave birth to the innovation of the ‘missed call’ which is used to convey pre-decided short messages such as ‘I am leaving’ or ‘I have arrived’ between two callers. ‘Chota (small) recharge’ is another marketing innovation that has helped mobile companies cater to daily wage earners. It perhaps drew its inspiration from the sachet revolution that began in South India with tiny shampoo packets selling for as low as 50 paise to make costly products affordable to consumers at the so-called Bottom of the Pyramid enunciated by economist C.K. Prahalad. In the same way, the innovation of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) makes digital payment possible even for people without smartphones.

New models of delivery or production or service, and ‘out of the box’ ways of building institutions also proved to be great innovations. The Delhi Metro is an example. It was executed through a novel partnership between the state and central governments, and not as a subsidiary or division of the Indian Railways. The mechanism facilitated faster decision-making, sharing of responsibility, ease in financial borrowings and so on. Innovative policies, government programmes and laws have also ushered in change. The best example in this category is the Indian Patent Act enacted in 1970, which recognized the process patent – in place of the product patent – a change that made the production of affordable generic drugs possible in India.

India’s journey since 1947 shows that innovation is not just related to technology as seen in the West. In this book, the term ‘innovation’ has been used in the broadest possible sense. It covers technological innovations, novel scientific solutions, new ideas in business and industry, path-breaking government policies and programmes, grassroots innovations, laws and regulations designed to serve a unique purpose, new ways of institution-building, people’s movements and practices. Though several science and technology-led innovations figure in this book, it is not supposed to be documentation of India’s achievements in space, atomic energy, biotechnology, engineering and so on. Given the diverse nature of innovations and new ideas across sectors, it was a tough task mapping innovations over seventy-five years. Certain criteria had to be defined for inclusion or exclusion. Broadly, these criteria are the disruptive nature of innovations, turning points or the watershed character of innovations in various fields, new ideas that triggered a trend and innovations that had a lasting impact on society, in general.

The seventy-five-year journey also shows that Indian innovation is not jugaad – a term that has attained some amount of respectability thanks to management gurus and Western experts. They often use ‘jugaad’ to describe frugal and grassroots innovations in the Indian context. This is rather fallacious because jugaad is not innovation. It is a quick fix, a short-term solution to overcome inefficiency in a system or product or shortcomings in infrastructure, and has harmful consequences for users. Jugaad connotes improvisation to fulfil certain immediate needs. Anyone who understands the social-cultural context of jugaad would know it is not innovation but a representation of a mindset that promotes crude improvization which is not always safe or sustainable. The jugaad is said to have emerged in the 1960s in Punjab where farmers put together a contraption by attaching a pump set engine with discarded automobiles’ parts and a four-wheeled cart. It was used to transport agricultural produce and people over short distances.

Solutions based on jugaad, according to Anil K. Gupta in his book Grassroots Innovation, are an indicator of ‘what we lack in design, manufacture, supply chain and user-driven redesign processes’. Over the years, jugaad has become a generic term for any product or action meant to provide a quick solution even if it is not sustainable or potentially harmful. Its depiction in popular culture normalized it, while management experts mainstreamed it much to the chagrin of frugal or grassroots innovators whose works are being dubbed as the Indian jugaad. Some academicians have gone to the extent of calling genuine technological or business innovations – even the Mars Orbiter Mission of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) – as instances of jugaad, which is appalling.

It is important to shrug off this image of India being a ‘jugaad nation’, and also the pessimistic narrative saying ‘nothing has happened in India in the past seventy-five years’. Scholars so far have looked at the Indian innovation ecosystem in silos – innovation at the firm or business level and grassroots innovations – or have studied innovations in specific sectors like health or information and communication technologies, nanotechnology and so on. This book attempts to map Indian innovations holistically.

How the Book Is Organized

The number of innovations included in the book is one hundred but by no means is it an exhaustive list. It covers innovations emanating from both formal institutions and the informal sector, government and non-government organizations, business and industry as well as individuals and groups of people. Some of the innovations deserve longer narration and even full-length books. Some have already been the subject of movies and books.

The first chapter is about mega innovations that are usually referred to as ‘revolutions’, which have been critical for progress in food production and communications. A note about the word ‘revolutions’ in the first chapter needs explanation. In the world of technology and innovation, as technology writer Walter Isaacson points, there are no revolutions but evolutions. Yet, we hear about revolutions whenever there is a dramatic change in a particular sector or technology which is transformative in a given period. In India, this started with the Green Revolution and the term ‘revolution’ has remained to refer to any change that has been dramatic and has occurred over a relatively short period. That’s how we have so many ‘revolutions’. For want of better terminology, it is better not to depart from this usage. The first chapter includes seven major innovations that fulfil the criteria discussed here, though there are a few other ‘revolutions’ that figure in thematic chapters.

The rest of the nine chapters have been arranged thematically, and not chronologically or alphabetically. In some chapters, many categories have been clubbed for the sake of convenience. An example is the ninth chapter, which covers innovations in art, cinema, fashion, culture, religion and architecture. A few others could have featured in more than one list as they are intersectoral. In this sense, the categories are not watertight. In any case, each innovation has been dealt with as a stand-alone narrative and need not be read as part of a particular chapter. Each narrative provides the context, origin and core features of the innovation, as well as its dissemination, impact and key people behind it. Barring a few, all the narratives are brief and written in a manner that provides a snapshot of the development. They do touch upon controversies and criticisms but are not to be seen as a critical analysis of the innovation concerned. Despite all their flaws, these innovations remain landmarks in the journey of India. They are contextspecific and judging them in the perspective of the 2020s would not be justified. For more about individual innovations, readers are advised to explore references given at the end of each chapter.

The process of innovation and its dissemination is evolutionary, both in the case of innovations coming from institutions and those from individuals. More often, this process involves multiple people at different points of time and in different roles or capacities. In addition, innovations and technologies take shape due to multiple factors and not just technological ones. The factors or parameters involved are social, political, cultural, industrial, economic and so on. Wherever possible, an attempt has been made to bring out major factors at play while discussing innovations and their impact on society.

In the same way, key individuals involved in the process have been identified though ‘credit giving’ is a contested territory, and the exact role of people is unclear in many cases. In some cases, work has been done by collaborative teams across institutions. Still, this book throws up several names of many people who have largely remained unsung and ‘uncelebrated’ beyond their niche area of expertise. This list includes plant breeder Benjamin Peary Pal, dairy technologist Harichand Dalaya, veterinarian B.V. Rao, software engineer Narendra Patni, telecom engineer G.B. Meemansi, engineering scientist Manmohan Suri, water expert Cyrus Gaikwad, educationists Tarabai Modak and Anutai Wagh, human rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves, rights activist Aruna Roy, family planning official Dharmendra Kumar Tyagi, scientist Alla Venkata Rama Rao, industrialists Cyrus Poonawala and Yusuf Hamied, virologist T. Jacob John, public health expert Noshir Hormasji Antia, eye specialist Govindappa Venkataswamy, pathologist V. Ramalingaswamy, surgeon Pramod Karan Seth, master craftsman Ramachandra Sharma, palliative care expert M.R. Rajagopal, entrepreneur Sudarshan K. Maini, ex-army officer G.R. Gopinath, internet entrepreneurs Murugavel Janakiraman and Anupam Mittal, lawyer couple Kapila and Nirmal Hingorani, management expert Ravi Matthai, grassroots innovators Arunachalam Muruganantham, Mansukh Bhai Prajapati and Subhas Ola, IIT professor Kiran Seth, designer Devika Bhojwani, forester Kailash Sankhla, retired civil engineer Chewang Norphel, and many others. This is a set of extraordinary Indians who, among several other well-known names like M.S. Swaminathan, Verghese Kurien and Sam Pitroda, have contributed immensely to innovating India.

References

Gupta, Anil K. Grassroots Innovation: Minds on the Margin Are Not Marginal Minds. New Delhi: Random House India, 2016.

Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Li, Peter Ping. Disruptive Innovation in Chinese and Indian Businesses: The Strategic Implications for Local Entrepreneurs and Global Incumbents. New Delhi: Routledge, 2013.

Prabhu, Jaideep, and Sanjay Jain. ‘Innovation and entrepreneurship in India: Understanding jugaad’. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 32 (4), 2015: 843–68.

Prahalad, Coimbatore Krishna. ‘Bottom of the Pyramid as a Source of Breakthrough Innovations’. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29 (1), 2012: 6–12.

Radjou, Navi, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja. Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

Singh, Harbir, Ananth Padmanabhan, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel (eds), India as a Pioneer of Innovation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017.

The Revolutions

When India became a free nation in 1947, it was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural with 85 per cent of its population living in villages and economically dependent on agriculture and traditional vocations. Despite it being an agricultural country, India did not produce enough foodgrains to feed its people, which meant that essential foodgrains had to be imported regularly. India also had a vast population of cattle, but their productivity was abysmal. Milk supplies in cities was a monopoly of colonial-era private dairies. The essential sources of nutrition, such as lentils, fish and eggs, were not accessible for a bulk of the population. In the early years, the focus was on more rapid industrialization and institution-building. In the 1960s, when food shortages became too acute, the focus shifted to attaining self-sufficiency in food production. The Green Revolution and the White Revolution brought dramatic changes in the food output during the 1960s and the 1970s. Other revolutions in the 1980s expanded the food basket to include eggs, fish and vegetable oils. While science-led innovation was a key driver of these revolutions, their success depended on innovative