Jaipur Foot restores dignity, mobility to the world's amputees

The Jaipur Foot, which has just won a Tech Museum 2007 Equality Award, provides an ingenious and low-cost technology to provide prosthetic limbs for amputees. Most of the world's 18 million amputees live in remote, poor, and war-ravaged areas where landmines and accidents are increase their numbers daily. Prosthetics are expensive, and people without a limb often become socially isolated and cannot earn a living.

The Jaipur Foot helps restore mobility and dignity. It is lightweight, strong, and has virtually the same range of movement and appearance as a human foot. Users can do everything from running and pedaling a bicycle to removing shoes for cultural ceremonies. Amputees who visit Mehta's clinics or mobile workshops receive their new limbs at no cost, and can return to improved lives in just a day or two.

This humanitarian endeavour grew out of a trauma experienced by its founder, Devendra Raj Mehta, whose leg was crushed in a serious car accident in 1969. His leg was saved, but his awareness that in such situations, poor patients often lost their limbs, led him to work on a way to help them.

Ram Chandra, one of Jaipur City’s finest sculptor, had first developed the Jaipur Foot in 1968 with the aid of three doctors including an orthopedic surgeon. However, the innovative foot alone was not enough to address the need – mass manufacturing, and an organization that would serve large numbers of amputees humanely, was needed. Thus, in March 1975, Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti was created as a non-profit society. Between 1975 and 1982, it fitted more than 10,583 limbs, and patients from all over India began to come to Jaipur.

Now, BMVSS fits between 17,000 and 20,000 artificial limbs each year, and its work has spread all over India through its 16 branches. Recognizing that people who had lost limbs had little time for many visits and long stays in hospitals, the society developed a system of camps and clinics that allowed the limb to be fitted within a day, sometimes within hours. Disadvantaged people in remote areas are reached through the 40 to 50 mobile-camps held each year. BMVSS, now the largest organization for the handicapped in the world, had fitted 236,717 limbs in India and 14,070 in other countries around the world by the spring of 2003.

To ensure widespread distribution, BMVSS did not patent the foot, and shares its technology as widely as possible, supporting more than 30 independent institutions in India that fit artificial limbs by sharing the technology and providing training to their staff. The Jaipur Foot also has been distributed through camps in 20 countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Indonesia, Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, Nepal, Panama, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Somalia, Trinidad, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and Sudan, and several Jaipur foot centres have been established outside India.

BMVSS has 10 branches in India, and about 60 workshops fabricate or fit the Jaipur Foot in India. The society also has helped establish several centres outside India. Funded by the Indian government and philanthropic groups, BMVSS and similar organizations provide medical care, room, board, and a prosthetic at no cost to the patient. Its philosophy regards its free assistance as help, not charity; its treatment is patient-centred, focusing on restoring dignity to the people it serves; and it serves all equally, regardless of belief, ethnicity, place of residence, or social and economic status.

This story was compiled from information on the BMVSS website; the Tech Museum award citation; and a story about the Jaipur Foot told by award-winning economist C.K. Prahalad in his brilliant book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, published by Wharton School of Publishing in 2006. See here for a quick summary of the message of this book.