Farmer's invention revolutionizes cotton industry in Gujarat

Mansukhbhai Patel, a farmer with a 10th-grade education, has revolutionized the cotton industry in the western Indian state of Gujarat with a cotton spinner he invented to cope with the region’s unique harvesting challenges. An equally unique network set up to find and support India’s grassroots inventors helped him refine his invention.

Gujarat’s farmers grow a tough variety of cotton, called V-797, that does not need much water and can withstand the harsh, arid climate. But its sturdy pods must be picked off the plant and cracked manually to extract the fibers. This task, performed by women and children, often cannot be finished in time, and also keeps children out of school.

Mr. Patel, a self-taught electrician and mechanic, began work on his machine in 1991, and sold some machines to local ginners in 1993. But the machines failed when a wire mesh plate broke. Mr. Patel refunded the money and continued to work on his invention.

Then in 1995, college student Hirendra Rawal put him in touch with Anil Gupta, who teaches at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and whose Honey Bee Network seeks out tinkerers, mechanics, and self-taught scientists in villages across India. Mr. Gupta brought a visiting professor from Bombay’s Indian Institute of Technology to meet Mr. Patel. The professor said that with some alterations, the stripper would be fine. Then, Mr. Gupta brought a German exchange student to work with Mr. Patel. Their final model, built in 1999, worked perfectly.

Mr. Rawal was one of many scouts – academics, scientists, graduate students, farmers, and artisans who make a yearly journey of discovery called a shodhyatra to seek out traditional knowledge and share the inventions of others. Such scouts also discovered Amrutbhai Agrawat and his tilting bullock-cart, which spreads manure more efficiently on small fields; Mansukhbhai Jagani's modified motorcycle, which can till, weed, and sow; Kalpesh Gujjar's energy-saving seed-oil extractor; and Arvindbhai Patel's non-electric water chiller. All wanted to make their work easier.

"The student scouts are given a clear mandate," says Mr. Gupta. "Go from village to village and look for the oddballs, the crazy ones, the ones who do something different and don't follow set patterns, the ones with curiosity, who have come up with homegrown solutions for various problems.”

The inspiration for the Honey Bee Network came from Mr. Gupta’s realization, while working with farmers in Bangladesh, that academics learned much from rural residents but rarely gave anything practical back to them. He decided to help rural innovators by securing intellectual property rights for them and publicizing their inventions. Honey Bee magazine is now published in eight languages, sharing the discoveries made by rural inventors. 

The Network led to the creation of the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (Sristi)  in 1993, and the Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN)  in 1997, to take innovations forward. The State of Gujarat gave GIAN $230,000, creating “India’s first microventure incubation fund."

GIAN gave Mr. Patel $5,100 to start producing the cotton stripper commercially, and the first sales were made in 2000. In 2003, GIAN helped Mr. Patel obtain a U.S. patent and in 2004, he won India's National Research Development Corporation technology award for best innovation. Today he earns nearly $7,000 a year, and he is happy. His children are set for life, and his wife no longer scolds him for his tinkering.

The ginners are equally pleased. Says Prabhubhai Thakkar, who owns six machines: "I used to produce only 400 to 500 bales of cotton, but now I produce 30,000 bales a year."

Five years ago, Mr. Gupta convinced the Indian government to set up the National Innovations Foundation, with an endowment of $4.6-million which supports and finances grassroots innovations. The foundation has so far documented 51,000 mechanical, technical, and herbal inventions and practices in more than 300 Indian districts.

This story was considerably abridged and adapted from a much longer story by Shailaja Neelakantan, entitled “Scouting for Homegrown Ingenuity: A unique academic network nurtures innovation among India’s poor”, which was published 30 Sept. 2005 in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Ms. Neelakantan is the South Asian correspondent for the Chronicle.