Dr. Anil Gupta of Sristi.org and Honey Bee Networks shares in interview his belief in the knowledge and talent of those who many wish to shun. He also discusses his wish for more social and entrepreneurial collaborations between Pakistan and India. He was recently named, along with six others,  to the National Innovation Council of India by the Prime Minister Manmohan SINGH. The benevolence of the knowledge providers, often “common people,” becomes the source of their impoverishment. Mr. Gupta and others wanted to end this ethical and professional crisis.

Honey Bee is a metaphor indicating ethical as well as professional values, which most of us seldom practice. A honey bee does two things that we intellectuals, often don’t do. It collects pollen from the flowers and flowers don’t complain. It connects flower to flower through pollination. Similarly our innovative and ethical approach to knowledge extraction, our sincere attempt to build up people to people communication and our commitment to let reasonable benefit be shared with the knowledge holders, qualifies us to identify ourselves with the great metaphor of Honey Bee. Enter Honey Bee Networks. Readers are encouraged to start their own.

Podcast 1 of 3 …

Anil Gupta: The lesson from this exercise is that if any government, any institution would like create a similar network which we hope they would. They shouldn’t wait for innovators to come to them. Most innovators in rural don’t read newspapers. They might watch a little news.

They would rather do whatever it takes to get on with their lives. Basically, they see a problem, solve it with an “innovation,” and move on. They are not seeking out recognition and appreciation.

The universities and networks need to search for innovations. That is how we found Mr. Saidullah. He’s a 70+ year old person selling honey in a small town in India. He’s a great poet also. Go to Youtube for India Innovators. You will find his video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REx9rMDbqRgof his amphibious cyle. It works on the water and on the road.

In an extraordinary moving and motivating narration in 35 seconds, that it creates a miracle. He tells the story of his wife Noor inspired him to design the cycle. He earned a lifetime achievement award.

The tragedy, however, is his life did not change a great deal. He got a small amount of money, but that doesn’t help much unless there is a market for the cycle.

A lot of Indians are very saddened by the losses and suffering of Pakistanis during the recent flooding. This cycle could come to help. It can go where boats cannot go. This feature can be retrofitted on existing cycles. Just look at his design and fabricate it from the start right there in Pakistan. Start distributing this package. We believe this is a great solution he developed.

There is another person, Mr. Ephraim of class III in a less developed area of India. He grew up to develope a cycle with a different design. He also developed water walking shoes by which a person can walk on water. These are simple ideas. No one has developed them.

I begin with these examples because I am conscious of the pain and suffering that a lot of our friends in Pakistan are dealing with in the recent floods. The ideas we have are open access.

We do not want to charge a license fee to people who are in need of it. It does not require great genius to fabricate. Anyone can do that.

There is an innovator Birendra Kumar Sinh who developed a pollution-control device, a diesel engine silencer.

All of us know that power supply is very difficult in many countries. A generator makes a lot of noise also and is part of excessive emission of carbon particles. The device is able to capture a kilogram of carbon every month. Why did he do it? Because a local school was opposing his workshop. Children were getting disturbed. The school could not be moved away. So, he invented a solution for many reasons but especially, so the children would not get smoke from his shop in their eyes nor be bothered by the noise.

Sometimes innovators create ideas because they want to solve somebody else’s problem such as this last one.

There is another person in the same city, named ?, who is a roadside mechanic. He got an idea. A lot of people who sell tea on the shacks have a small stove, box, and water to make and sell tea. Poor people selling tea to other poor people. They try to make a few rupees per day. So he converted a pressure cooker in a coffee making machine. The steam from the pressure cooker could be used to make espresso coffee. Now, he has expanded his market. With few hundred rupees, one can turn a pressure cooker into a coffee machine. This tea shop owner is getting more income now, more customers who want tea, but also coffee… at what cost? A few hundred rupees.

We are happy to share this knowledge with tea shop owners in Karachi, in Lahore. The industrial coffee machines are very costly and use much power. With this simple innovation, anyone can become self-employed. The more employment we can create, the less crime we will have. The less conflict we will have. More peace will follow.

The model we are trying to talk about is the model of peace, democracy and higher learning. A model that makes people feel more useful. In my Tech Talk, I included a critique of Maslov’s theory. He does not know anything about the way people in South Asia … in the tropical areas … would live. There are a lot of people who do not have enough food. They still try to achieve.

It is not true that we must meet the lower order needs before we start enlightenment. People can search for enlightenment at any level.

Recently we went to Maharashtra, in the central region of India where Maoists (leftists) are waging a war against the country. Many killings. They use violence which we don’t endorse, but in other words, they are drawing attention to themselves. In the neighboring countries such as Afghanistan, you have rivalry tribes. These type of people have not profited from the recent economic developments in the area such as in Pakistan and India.

They still have aspirations for their lives. They have access to television. The infrastructure in both regions is very bad.

Next, we find a hand pump, that when you press it down, it makes the iron face the pump. In the country, they resolved the problem. No where else had we seen this. They tie a tire through the hand pump, so the handle does not go through and down below. Now, it won’t hurt the hands of the person using the pump. Simple ideas. Simple solutions.

We have walked over 4000 K in North, Central and South India. We have seen the same problem all over the country, but the solution came in one of the most violence-prone areas of India, where the people appear to backwards, they are also economically disadvantaged. They have creativity and curiosity that is second to none.

There is no part of our country that we have not found innovation. In Kashmir, a young boy of 17 or 18 developed a tree climber. They even developed a walnut-cracking machine. Normally, walnuts in Pakistan and India are cracked manually. Now, with this machine it is possible mechanically.

I must say there is no part of our country Kashmir, NorthEast, Central, etc. everywhere we have come across fantastic innovators who have solved their problems and rediscovered their lives, thanks to our Honey Bee Network volunteers.

We ask our students to look for crazy people around them during their summer vacation and during holidays.

Suzanne Bowen: Of course,

Anil Gupta: There are a lot of young people here. Teachers tell them go around your houses and look for the people who are restless. People who do not accept things the way they are. Those are the innovators we are looking for.

Podcast 2 of 3 …  
 

Suzanne Bowen: Welcome to the DIDX and Techistan podcast media channel, while we bring you the extra tease of interesting people around the world. I’m your host Suzanne Bowen and today we have with us Dr. Anil Gupta. He’s a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, he founded the Honey Bee Network. He was recently announced by the Prime Minister of India, two days ago, as a member of the National Innovation Council.

Dr. Anil Gupta: Council.

Suzanne Bowen: “Council” … and he’s with sristi.org and a program called GIAN, which is an incubator program. We’re really happy to have Anil with us. Thank you from Pensacola, Florida to your area in India so….

>Dr. Anil Gupta: Thank you, Suzanne.

Suzanne Bowen: We’ve been studying your website, and I noticed that you’re heavily involved in….you see the the enormous economical possibilities from the knowledge of people who are economically poor. They’re full of talent, they’re intelligent, they’re extremely entrepreneurial in attitude, but they need a little help. Tell us little bit about Honey Bee Network.

Second thing I noticed was that, much of the world’s knowledge through mid-80s was in the English language only. Common people of India and Pakistan do not necessarily understand English. They may understand Urdu. They may understand Hindi or Punjabi or any other language and the question then is, that if you don’t show what you’ve learned from time in the language that they understand, then it will never go back to them.

So the result is one, you don’t acknowledge them.  Next, you take their knowledge and share it only among your professional colleagues, so people who don’t know have easy access to the knowledge, do not get a chance to study it, to partake of it, to improve it, to benefit from it.

Third thing was that… you were not connecting them, you were not cross polluting the ideas. People in one part of the world did not have the chance to learn from the other part. That’s the reason why I so much appreciate the initiative to teach me how they them how they taught us because you give them a chance. This is what we have learned over the past few decades in India, in terms of and in defining potential of common people.

You will find these same kind of people and maybe even more creative in Pakistan. There is no reason why the cultures … together in different parts of the world can’t get over the difficulties. This means for a part because there are difficulties we have to overcome, we wanted a platform where people can learn from each other. It is a network of platforms which that should acknowledge the knowledge of people in the local language.

When we document the knowledge, when we file it for them, when we license it, the benefit will go back to the people whose knowledge made those products possible. This means that we create a new model of development, a knowledge-intensive model, a knowledge-powering model, a model which does not treat poor people as poor. That’s the reason why I don’t like the term, “bottom of the pyramid” because it assumes that poor people are at the bottom of all pyramids. They may be at the bottom of the economic pyramid. but they’re not necessarily at the bottom of the ethical pyramid.

They are more generous quite often than rich people. They tend to be more open. They are community-oriented and they also have very many times, more creativity and innovative spirit, so in innovation they may be at the top. In ethical pyramid, they will be at the top, so you must be very careful when using language because language shapes the habit of thought.

Honey Bee network at this time is a horizontal network, which connects here in India to people across the world. We have presence in seventy-five countries to varying extent. China, in fact, has taken to this network idea very aggressively. University of Finance in economics are our active partners, who have documented more than three thousand innovations of the common people.

Every six months we walk in a different part of the country (India) and I have walked more than four thousand kilometers in different, more than twenty states of India. Our next walk will be the fifth walk, maybe in Nichols, Marharashta state. People come together to do this with us at their own cost. They ive together, eat together and learn together from the common people. We celebrate the knowledge innovation of the people. This is how the network started.

We also work with children, we organize competitions called Ignite and the first award was announced October 15th which is the birthday of Abdul Kalam, our former president of India.

Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam’s award (the award being discussed here) is given by him every year. This year’s award will be given on November 8th. N Now that’s a way to celebrate innovations that come from the children. Last year the president of India gave out the awards, and in fact, she hosted an exhibition of innovations on March in this year. When the president of a nation hosts such an exhibition and gives awards to people, it creates a new signature for the innovation of common people.

It is important to recognize the solution of some persistent problems might come not from the RND institutions or the big colleges big labs, but it also comes from common people.

Suzanne Bowen: This is a pretty revolutionary thought but it’s not just a thought. You are putting into action. I’m checking out for example your top ranking projects in the technology area, and I see a black box for vehicle is creating a personalized vehicle suitable for transportation in narrow lands which is I know that is a big need in different areas of the world. Will you share some other examples, the ideas and the products that you seen come out of this kind of work?

Dr Anil Gupta: Yes I am very happy to give you a few examples and also share some other challenges that we faced so that those of your listeners or readers of the programs who are going to be looking at the sites and looking at the innovations we have at nif.org.in or sristi.org and gian.org.

SRISTI came in to being 10 years age. We gives ads in the news paper. We couldn’t afford it. Now we give once and twice a years. We received hardly a thousand entries and response through the news paper and advertisement as against that we received tens of thousand of ideas and innovations through scouting process. This is where we go out to the villages and search. This is the nature of Honey Bee network where people who go out and search on their own time. They don’t get paid, there is lots of detailed documentation required. We have some resources which we share with them, like two lacs three lacs one lacs … from different collaborators for documentation and sending that data to NIF. Now …

Listen to the podcast interview, part 3 of 3, or read the transcript:   

Anil Gupta: A large number of old people have traditional knowledge. They were here when some modern medicine was not there, but they continued living somehow. The knowledge may have evolved, but it doesn’t mean the value goes down today.

Some of those traditions can be used, maybe modified even today. We are a great believer that part of knowledge can be functionally valid must be drawn upon in our day to day life.

We document traditional knowledge which sometimes result in real and practical new products. Often, they help us to take chemicals out of our lives. Improve productivity in farming and reduce costs.

For every human, men and women,  has knowledge. This is a movement (sic – Honey Bee Network, from Mind to Market) that must spread through different parts of the world. It can be under different names, under different kinds of leadership. We should not keep to ourselves and share the knowledge at the cost of the owner of the knowledge we document.

Remember, they trusted us when they shared the knowledge in good faith. Now, it is our responsibility to help them grow up in their lives. This helps others around the world who could benefit from this knowledge tomorrow or today.

In Pakistan and India and elsewhere, I hope there are some friends who are listening to this program … will get motivated to make their own platform, take empty bottles, make boats out of them. These are the things possible to help the people who are marooned, who need our help.

Suzanne Bowen: I think I should walk away and get more active myself in these manners. I like the non-elitist attitude, Anil. One example is recently I was involved in a conversation on a social network called Facebook with 50 or 60 others.  A question was posed by Rehan Allahwala, our company CEO… basically, maybe things could change among the economically poor if their complete schooling opportunities included Urdu and English every day.

I taught English and other subjects in a school considered to be economically poor. We used the Internet to research, write and listen; learned foreign languages through song and conversation. I remember someone saying to me, “Why are you wasting time? They should be learning to read and write.”

I laughed, “That is exactly what they are doing.”

Some in the Facebook conversation, some felt that not every child can learn more than one language at a time … especially if they are disadvantaged in any way. I disagree.

Anil Gupta: I think first of all that mother tongue is very important. I still write and read in Hindi. I write poetry in Hindi. I am proud of my language. I think sometimes that I also think in Hindi. I don’t feel diffident or shy in admitting that my training in Hindi gave me access to certain concepts and words. Let me illustrate.

There’s a word in Hindi “(barabara darda.” “barabara” means equal, and “darda” means pain. So when you feel someone else’s pain exactly as that person feels it, it becomes your pain. This is a very noble activity. You are not patrionizing the other person. You are showing your equality.

Now, Urdu is a very rich language … that we cannot say in Hindi and we cannot say in English. There is a huge richness in the languages. In fact, Munshi Premchand, a famous Hindi writer and novelist, and socialist. He was a socially-conscious, progressive writer. He also wrote in Urdu. There are many people who got their ?? with more than just a decorum. The culture and thoughtfulness are what make one behave in a very decent manner.

Children should learn English, fine, but they should also learn Hindi, Urdu, Tamil or their local language. So their local languages give them access to those in the past and culture over a long period of time. If those thoughts are not available to us, then they are diluted.

We will not know our own backyard. There is something I shared on Facebook. I want to share it here, first in Urdu and then I will translate it.

(About 07:29 to into the podcast #3, Dr. Anil Gupta speaks some Urdu including something that sounds like “hogeh.” Techistan is waiting for correct spelling. Please accept our apologies.)

He says, “The wave of the great deluge appears to me like a shore.”

In the most pessimistic, depressing condition, I’m going to find a hope even though I have lost my boat, and my arms are tired, but I am still going ahead. This is the power of a language.

I can’t say those words in Hindi. I can’t.

My premise to my friends in Pakistan, friends in Kashmir where Urdu is spoken: you have a wonderful language of the world, one of the richest languages. It has enormous capacity to communicate human feelings and thought. Please don’t let it die. It should live.

Suzanne Bowen: Shukria.

Anil Gupta: Now, “shukria” is not “thank you,” you know. It means more than that.

Suzanne Bowen: Tell me. What does it mean?

Anil Gupta: You’re not really just appreciating the gesture of someone doing something good. You’re also grateful. Both appreciation and gratefulness. You thank someone for doing something… there is no “gratefulness” in that.

That is why in the Honey Bee Network, we believe that we bring out six languages. I would love to see Honey Bee Network in Urdu also. One objective of our talk today is that new networks are built to bring the ideas from the minds of those in remote areas to the markets of the world. It doesn’t have to be Honey Bee titled.

What we have discovered in some parts of Pakistan when there was a large water shortage and this has become popular in parts of India also … what they did was put clay pitchers in the fields and plant plants around the clay pitcher. Pitchers are buried in the ground. They put the water in the pitchers. This water will slowly ooze out to the root zone of the plant. The plant will grow. This began in Pakistan, then passed on to India.

There is a great deal of learning to take place across the borders, across the continent, across countries, cultures, languages.

You can lots of content in the English language. Even in the English language you won’t find much content (online and offline) from among the common people.

The question is “Why?” With billions of dollars that huge foundations in (To be filled in ??????).

Suzanne Bowen: Exactly. The Internet is the tool that help us do what you are encouraging. For example, all you need is a digital video camera. You can share innovation and mindset, the way of thinking, the creativity of people who we often think of as poor in every way. But … actually, they are quite rich in ideas, ways of life. This should be shared however whenever possible using the Internet in different languages translated even.

Anil Gupta: What I am saying is we must ask ourselves, when it comes to content produced by common people who may not have access to computers and mobiles, that will not travel on its own. Internet doesn’t have its own ears.

Someone else has to put that content there. We would need to make it available in multiple languages.

Internet is used mainly for entertainment, spreading propaganda, but not as much of learning from each other. Not for spreading good will.

At the same time, you and I are talking because you discovered us over the Internet. There is a positive side of it. So many possibilities to make connections across borders. You are on the tip of USA, and we are on this part of the world, India. We can now suddenly bring changes together.

It promotes fellowship. But if we can all do this in different languages, then perhaps we will go a step further.

Suzanne Bowen: Listeners might have noticed throughout this talk with Dr. Anil Gupta. He has delivered several challenges. One that I love is searching for the oddballs in a group, people who are not satisfied with the way life is in every nook and cranny of where you and I live. Scout them out. Listen to them. Share. Give them credit. Find ways they can benefit from their knowledge, invention and way of thinking to improve lives anywhere.

There should be Honey Bee Networks all over the world.

Anil, how would you summarize in a nutshell?

Anil Gupta: There are four or five challenges.

One is that those of us who are privileged in our lives by accident, on purpose, or by hard work … have a duty to spread the advantages of our privileges in a way that is creative and innovative.

One way would be to encourage the young people, students and children to look for crazy people in their neighborhood. Take note of the positive effect they have made to get over their problems. Put that together in local languages and also in English… in small datahouses of people who are doing something interesting. Something creative that has solved a problem technologically, institutionally, or culturally.

Second way is to translate the information into as many different languages as possible. So more people in the world can learn and participate.

Third, Honey Bee Networks’ websites is open access, so it could translated into Urdu or any language. Copy it. You don’t need my permission.

Fourth, bring in the investors, technologists, designers who will add value to these ideas to provide low-cost, affordable solutions. A proof of concept are what the typically poor people are not able to achieve. Their idea should become a prototype and then a product. That journey requires … well, the chairman of our foundation says, “Mind to market… the journey from mind to market.”
This has to be mediated by people like Suzanne Bowen, who are able to contribute with their own specific export manners, with talents and tools such as producing this podcast. Many small links in the chain!

It is not just learning from each other but also converting that learning into services and products. Today while people affected by floods in Pakistan, India or anywhere else, tomorrow should be a better day with new opportunities for them and the world. It is possible by including solutions by the common people who have very generous spirits.

This is what Honey Bee Network is there for. We want to reach out to all of you. There is a spirit of community that we all share. A common sky, a common sun that we share.
Suzanne Bowen: Tomorrow can be and should be a better day than today. Let’s put this into action. You can find information
at http://www.sristi.org. It’s been a beautiful experience talking with you, Anil. We’re both looking forward to this podcast helping to produce new friendships and collaborations that will result.

Anil Gupta: I am also hopeful about that. Thank you so much.

More related sites:
http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/the-forgotten-farm-labourer.html
http://www.slideshare.net/pragyamodi/honey-bee-network-1808139
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6110
http://www.honeybeenetwork.com